Web development

In Part One we estimated the number of websites that use Drupal as of July 2010. You can read that.

Per capita (so to speak), which of the big three open-source content management systems (Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress) has the most vigorous development community? This isn’t about the biggest community, but the busiest. For reference, here’s the estimated number of sites powered by each of the big three as of July 2010:

I’m going to keep this post shorter than the previous one, mainly because there’s much less estimating to philosophize about this time. Like our first post, there’s no direct way to quantify something like this, so we’ll have to fly at it from various angles.

Extensions

One way to measure developer industry: the number of extensions each community currently offers. At the moment, here’s how many community-developed CMS extensions are listed by each community’s official repository:

Drupal: 6,190
Joomla: 5,274
WordPress: 10,278

WordPress has almost double the extensions of either Drupal or Joomla. But we’re not evaluating numbers without context; we’re interested in how many extensions each generates relative to its community size.

According to this, we can reasonably conclude the average Drupal developer is somewhat more likely to work on an extension than the average Joomla or WordPress developer. For the value of such an observation, I turn to you, comment section.

Of course, this isn’t a comment on the quality of these extensions. All three have pearls of really stunning work, and all three have duds and abandoned projects. It would take a million monkeys on a million keyboards a million years to learn how to operate a single module, let alone rank 21,742 extensions by quality. It would take a million people much less time, but there’s only one person writing this post, so any rankings based on quality won’t be considered here. Only sheer volume.

Forums

Did I take the time to add up the posts found at the official community forums of Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress? Afraid so. Totals:

Drupal: 836,000+
Joomla: 2,042,000+
WordPress: 470,000+

Totals in the context of community size:

So Drupal and Joomla people like to talk to other Drupal and Joomla people all day long, while WordPress people just blog it out. One could point out that Drupal and Joomla are much more complicated and powerful than WordPress, so of course more message board questions, strategies, theories, taboos, memes, and myths will arise from their respective camps.

Conference Attendance

All three communities have meetups around the world, whether they’re called WordCamps, Drupalcamps, Joomla! Days, or what have you. All three communities have these things several times a year in cities around the world. Attendance at these deals tends to range in the 100-300 ballpark. We’ll call attendance even for all three. Seriously, Google your mind out if you want, but it’s pretty close across the board.

However, Drupal also holds DrupalCon twice a year (once in North America, once elsewhere). WordPress and Joomla don’t have anything that compares — the most recent DrupalCon, an April weekender in San Francisco, was the tenth such event (we attended #8) and featured around 3,000 attendees, while the inaugural Joomla! World Conference has been postponed. In fact, DrupalCon has been such a success that WordPress is considering following in Drupal’s footsteps:

I’m not going to add up the claimed attendance of the dozens of Temples of Joom! and WordFests and Drupaloozas that have popped up all over the world, but DrupalCon makes it pretty clear Drupal developers are the most likely to gather with each other in large masses to be nerds all day. Until WordStock takes off, at least. And considering Drupal is the smallest community as far as user base goes, that’s pretty impressive.

In Conclusion

I feel we’ve made a non-insane case that Drupal’s development community is the busiest of the big three’s. While all three are amazing products and capable of doing just about anything, we’ve chosen to hitch 70% of our wagon to Drupal for a reason. (30% of our wagon remains hitched to WordPress, so here’s hoping they don’t go and call their conference WehatedrupalconCon.)

BONUS SECTION: DESIGNERS

So that’s developers. What about designers? This one’s a blowout.

I Googled X themes (X being WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal) and noted the number of results for each — 775,000 for Drupal, 4 million for Joomla, and almost 54 million for WordPress. Divide those by the number of sites for each, and we have:

Even though wordpress themes is a popular spam thing, surely inflating those Google results, it’s still apparent that WordPress is the most designer-y CMS. Not that we didn’t know this, but here’s a little visualization of the nerdiest possible way to perceive the disparity.

The University of Washington’s Career Center needed some help with its Drupal site. The Dawgs rank among the many, many esteemed universities using Drupal*, and their entire web presence needs to reflect the university’s standard for excellence — U Dub is one of the world’s 25 best and most prestigious universities and the world’s best medical school.

As a brief overview of our role in this project, we:

• Coded the theme, based on a design by UW staff, to fit the main site’s new look.
• Rebuilt the site’s dropdown menus to work like the main site’s.
• Upgraded from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6.
• Imported all content (including most recent webform submissions and what have you).
• Adjusted inline page tools capabilities, including the arrangement of them all into a single tidy block.
• Reworked a custom Trumba calendar module to be Drupal 6 compatible.
• General blocks, menus, templates, and modules Drupalery.
• And so on and so forth.

Here you can see the site’s old header, which didn’t match the rest of the university website’s layout, menu functionality, and visuals. Its many orange elements veered from the classic Husky purple and gold — and web-friendly gray — color scheme, leaving the Career Center’s decor looking a little wrong. (The new header can be seen in the image above.) Note that we didn’t design the new header and footer; we implemented it into CSS:

This is the site’s former footer:

And this is how the footer, redesigned by Career Center staff, looks after ENGINE’s assistance:

Bottom line: we’re very proud to now be associated — even if it’s in a very, very small way — with one of the nation’s oldest, most productive, and largest universities. If we may be so bold, we’re already looking forward to getting our next chance to lend our skills to another incredible academic institution.

We leave you with this:

* Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Cornell, and others use Drupal for various subsites, while universities including Rutgers, Duke, Calgary, and Boston University trust Drupal with their main sites.

We’re pleased to announce our successful redevelopment of the web home of Commonwealth Church Finance, a 30-year-old organization that has helped “over 600 churches and non-profit organizations obtain over half a billion dollars to finance construction.” Converting the site from Joomla! to WordPress proved to be a great move for CCF.

The site had used Joomla! 1.0 for some time, and needed an upgrade. But upgrading to Joomla! 1.5 is more of a migration than an upgrade — it’s simply not a developer-friendly process. As long as we had to migrate anyway, why not switch from Joomla! to WordPress, which is easier to use and has an open-source community that dwarfs Joomla!’s? Plus, upgrading the current site to future versions of WordPress will be a snap, especially compared to that daunting Jooma! 1.0-1.5 conversion. We’re still shuddering.

Luckily, CCF agreed to our conclusion. We retained the site’s look and feel, but custom-designed a more appealing header. Converting several static elements into dynamic elements (images into galleries, static pages into blog posts) makes the site easier to update and more flexible.

The site now uses Javascript APIs instead of its former piles of stray scripts scattered everywhere. Cleaning up code assures a faster and more web-standardized site.

We also enabled a Lightbox-esque solution for the site’s hosted video, using JW Player:

Changing this Joomla! site into a WordPress site was certainly worth it, as CCF now has greater control over its site and access to a much, much richer support community.

D.C. Open Government Coalition, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing government transparency, hired us to redesign their Drupal site. They had been using a theme very similar to the stock Drupal theme and needed a visual identity that also helped tell the story of what they do.

Using the colors most commonly linked with the United States government seemed like the right idea — with the most space devoted to white to take advantage of the obvious associations between clean and open. We also used rocket-glare red to draw attention to the Report a Violation item, creating a call to action that stands out without stealing the show.

To streamline the experience for both visitor and editor, we also modified several content types and consolidated some navigation items. For example, combining several of the site’s dynamic content avenues (News, Announcements, etc.) into a single Blog cuts down on clicks — plus readers are much more likely to use RSS when looking at something that acts like a blog instead of a news section.

As a side note we’re very proud to be a part of this project, as we wholeheartedly support efforts to increase government openness.

Atlanta cosmetic surgery consultant Carol Martin had three problems:

1. Her site’s tricky-to-use Flash navigation was as hard for search engines to read as it was for humans… and it was even worse for those on mobile devices like iPhones and iPads, obviously.
2. She was unable to update her own site’s content without paying a webmaster to do it for her.
3. Her Flash-intensive e-commerce section was arranged so that each product was piled into the same page, which was all of course damn near invisible to Google and mobile devices. Since she’d switched from static pages to a Flash setup, her sales had fallen.

Our solutions:

1. Rebuild the menu navigation using jQuery to achieve better aesthetics, better functionality (it now feels like you’re tactilely moving the slider instead of just aiming and praying), better usability, and better search engine visibility. Plus it works on iPads, BlackBerrys, and other mobiles now, making the entire site accessible to users on the go.
2. Customize WordPress for her, empowering her to update any of her own content from any computer at any time without any middle man whatsoever. We even rebuilt her old design as a custom WordPress theme.
3. Convert Flash-based store into static pages, making each individual page capable of pulling in traffic from search engines and improving usability.

Simple as that: