For some time, Drupal has a marketshare above 1% of all the sites onlne. Now there are numerous ways of counting and presenting data and if you know a bit about measuring and statistics, you know there are a zillion ways to lie.

The fact that Drupal has a big marketshare is something all can agree on. According to the way Dries has measured this is by visiting and fingerprinting the top 1 miljon websites (in hits) and see what percentage is being served with Drupal, as presented during DrupalCon SF.

According to builtwith.com Drupal now has 1.7% marketshare of all the sites entered at buildwith:

1. Drupal 1.69%
2. vBulletin 0.69%
3. Joomla! 0.32%

And Drupal is growing fast, see this (flash) graph. Is it relevant how many sites are using Drupal? Well, in open source it is all about eyeballs. Many eyeballs make all bugs shallow. Yet, eyeballs without installs means nothing. So yes, marketshare is important. More installs means more eyeballs and better code. Or if you are not a developer, more installs means bigger market and more money :-)

I always think it is funny to see a "a A /|" (bigger text selections) on a website. The decision to use this is always made by people who are not visually handicapped and think adding this to a website has anything to do with accessibility.

Blind people are blind on every website and use a braille browser, people with bad eyes are handicapped on every website and have a [control][plus] key combination in their browser. Mirroring browser functionality in the site is in fact a bad thing. Adding the "bigger text" buttons in a website does nothing for accessibility.

I always think it is funny to see a discussion about adding ZIP files on a website instead of a tarball. The decision to add this fileformat is always made by people who do not have a windows machine and and think adding this to a website has anything to do with gaining market-share.

Developers using windows are developers on all projects they work on and have a third party tool to unpack a tarball, people with interest in Drupal but no able to unpack a tarball can be pointed to a simple helptext. Solving problems with technology when it can be dealt with procedures is always a bad thing. Adding a zip distribution does nothing for marketshare but a lot for maintance costs.

Not that I consider windows users to be handicapped... Not at all... :-)

Last week we held the “Drupal Dev Days" at the HQ of dop.nu. This post reflects some thoughts on why we organised this camp, what we did and what we learned.

We started the smaller unconference Dev camp because we want to facilitate smaller groups to come together and work on targeted items. In the Netherlands we also have the DrupalJam’s. The last Jam had nearly 300 attendees and with the growing demand of Drupal services, this conference will grow for some time, 400 attendees in half a year is realistic.

Robert Douglass’ keynote during last DrupalJam, (c) Wessel Zwiers

To put this in perspective, a DrupalJam now is as big as a European DrupalCon only 4 years ago. And while having a big local conference is a good thing for networking and promotion, there is a growing need to get smaller more focussed “unofficial" camps to get better communication and more interaction. So DOP decided to facilitate a smaller camp with only developers, laptops, wifi, a nice location, tents, a BBQ, some beer and water-pistols. All the ingredients for having a good Drupal camp!

360 panorama of the place where DDD was held

And we did have a good time, the weather was very nice, lots of people brought local beer and while there was no program, we actually did a lot. That is, some just wanted to site and discuss, other wanted to learn and share and some just wanted to code.

For an impression of the camp, see this collection.

So what did we do during these three days apart from throwing buckets of water?

• Marc van Gend and Erik Stielstra started a module codenamed “turn me on" that enables the current site of a state to be saved. The idea is to have multiple states of a site for staging and production so one can easy turn on and off modules or settings that you want in a preproduction environment but not on a production site. This module will be released once completed.




• 10 people discussed on how to get a better User Interface for Hansel “breadcrumbs done right!" by co-worker Maurits Lawende. Hansel is a very powerful way of providing very flexible breadcrumbs on all pages and views yet with this power is currently hidden in a sub optimal interface. Hansel will never be as popular as the direct “competitors" (such as custom breadcrumbs) since you need to understand arguments and rules, yet we cam up with an easier interface that will hit d.o in the next release.




• Coworkers Maarten Verbaarschot and Sietse de ruiter did some work on the base theme Ink Ribbon




• Karten Frohwein gave a good presentation on simpletest




• The best part IMHO was kicked of by Clemens Tolboom, a session about helping develops -and users- to clean up their issue queue by using a system called Triage. Triage is a way to of prioritising patients based on the severity of their condition by relatively unskilled personal. This so professionals (doctors, maintainers) have a better queue where they can focus on musts and shoulds and users are forced to give better input to them. This system is in use at Gnome and seems to work fine there. For example, bigger modules like views have more then 1000 issues open, unworkable for those wanting to help out and the maintainer(s). If we would have a system where anyone could help by classifying bugs and by asking for more information or closing old bugs related to 4.x version, all benefit. If you want to help out in this prococes, please read 838682 and work from there.




• Maurits also worked on the Rate module. A module build on voting API that has a broader range then for example 5star with more value types. See a screenshot below:
  



and



• Morten -lead organiser of the upcoming DrupalCon in Copenhagen, skyped in to promote in his special way this event and was shown on the beamer. Nearly all of the attendees were already planning on visiting the DrupalCon Copenhagen, yet spreading the word always helps!

So what did we learn? The number of no shows is always high on these events. Sending out mails to the attendees on a regular basis is a good way to get feedback and ask if people are really coming. It is also a good thing to have some kind of program as a backup even if it is an unconference.


It was fun co-organising this with Rolf van de Krol and we will be doing this again next year!

Via PBS.org I found dataviz.org A website funded by Knight with a data visualization toolkit called VIDI.

I love good visualisations of data. And while most of the modules that are available are not that shocking, but the fact that one can use this as SAAS or download the modules and drop them on your own site, gives the power of data visualization to the masses.

Great work and I expect to see a lot more data and presentation of data on the web. Many small eyes for a better vision :-)

ooh, and please put these modules on d.o