drupal planet

Forrester Research says enterprises interested in open source web content management should keep a close eye on Drupal and Alfresco. We agree. So does the Alfresco team. It's great to see the cream rising to the top.

Acquia's global conference tour continues on next week. Yesterday, Jeff participated yesterday in what was described by Kathleen Reidy at The 451 Group as a star-studded open source panel at Enterprise 2.0.

I'm finishing up my fourth day at Acquia, and in thinking about how to introduce myself, one phrase immediately jumped to mind: "Who am I? Why am I here?"

##Acquia and growing Drupal
Part of my responsibilities at Acquia are to help grow the number of Drupal users. The Drupal community is growing quickly and the credit for that growth belongs to thousands of contributors and hundreds of Drupal evangelists. I've been personally working on growing Drupal for years, but recently I've begun working closely with my fellow Drupal association members Jacob Redding and Moshe Weitzman to explore how we can work with local groups to grow Drupal. In the rest of this blog post I cover information that I've gathered working with various members of the Drupal community and have shared with the Druapl infrastructure team, groups.drupal.org managers, and the Drupal marketing group. On Monday, June 9th, 5PM PDT Jacob and I will be hosting a web seminar to share our research and solicit feedback from local group organizers.

##Groups.drupal.org is growing
Currently, http://groups.drupal.org , GDO, acts as a rallying point for community events and helps reduce friction in Drupal event organizing. There are 8300 GDO users who are members of local groups, and events appear to be on track to grow from almost 400 in 2007 to 800 in 2008. GDO user growth is accelerating at a rate of 34 additional users per month, with almost 1,200 new users in March 2008 alone. This site now has over 1 million page views per month.

GDO has slow growth in the number of unique visitors climbing from 64,000 unique visitors to 84,000 unique visitors per month over 9 months ending March 2008. We believe that some improvements in user workflow and interaction design could dramatically increase the rate of participation on GDO.
Currently, 73% of visitors stay less than 30 seconds, with an average visit of 466 seconds. An upgrade of Drupal properties to Drupal 6 would enable the use of OpenID to further increase the total amount of users who could become members of local Drupal groups and ultimately attend local events. The authenticated user re-use rate for GDO is approximately 20% based on analysis over the last 24 months. This assures the Drupal community that GDO is a growing web property and worth putting further effort into.