17 January 2008

by Johan

Joomla! will reach turning point in March 2008.

At the end of 2007 Joomla! passed the 2.5 million download mark, which went by quite silently.

At the moment Joomla! is already on it’s way to the 3 million mark, which will likely be reached somewhere in february.

If you wanna track total downloads for the top 10 Joomla! extensions yourself you can easily do this by checking out the front page on Joomlacode.org. At the right side you will find a small overview of the top 10 projects, ranked by total downloads.

You will notice that our own DOCman is currently listed at 5th place with a total of 300.000 downloads.

Joomlacode has a very nice feature that allows you to create reports from different data sources. In my case I used it to get monthly download statistics for both Joomla! 1.0 and 1.5 in an effort to try and make a prediction about when Joomla! 1.5 will superseed 1.0. This resulted in the below graph.

Remarks :

  • There is no data available from before April 2007 because Joomlacode.org only opened it’s doors mid March 2007.
  • The data for January 2008 is extrapolated from the data available at the moment so it’s not a 100% but a good indication.
  • For October 2008 we are seeing a slightly higher amount of downloads for Joomla! 1.5, this is likely related to the release of Joomla! 1.5 RC3 beginning of that month.

Conclusions :

  • Joomla! 1.0 has been holding pretty steady at 200.000 downloads a month in 2007. Only from december we see a slight decline in downloads.
  • Joomla! 1.5 has slowly been increasing from 70.000 downloads in June towards 120.000 download a month in December.
  • Overall the introduction of 1.5 has increased the total amount of downloads each month from 200.000 for 1.0 only to 300.000 for both.

What does this tell us about the uptake of Joomla! 1.5 ? For that we need another graph that shows us the download percentage share for both :

Remarks :

  • The graph only shows the the percentage shares from the release of 1.5 RC1 and forward.
  • The graph shows a steady 5% increase of 1.5 downloads in regards to 1.0 from November 2007.

Based on this data I would dare to conclude that Joomla! 1.5 will superseed Joomla! 1.0 in March 2008. Exciting times ahead !

  • AmyStephen

    Now that is a nice blog! I am nearly certain your estimates are going to prove to be on the conservative side.

    What a great effort on behalf of some pretty amazing people – you, Johan, Louis and Andrew have led the way with the code. But, it took the efforts of each of the amazing members of the core team, the working groups, and even the other hang-around groupies, such as myself.

    Congratulations and thanks to you and to all! 2008 is going to rock!

  • Marky

    Downloads do not equate to use. I have downloaded Joomla at least twice since it became available and have never installed it to a public website; only dabbled with it to see what could be done.

    If you have a mechanism to learn how many websites was using Joomla as opposed to actual downloads you might have a figure people could associate with.

    - Marky

  • Mathias

    I agree with you Marky, that would be great, but unfortunately such data is not easy to come by. There’s no way of knowing who downloads Joomla! but doesn’t install it, who downloads it once and installs it on 10+ sites, or uses a subversion checkout. It’s also not counting the many localised packags fo Joomla! that are distributed through countless international sites.
    One way to make educated guesses, would be to compare these figures to the number of users posting in joomla! 1.5 forums.

    What this data _does_ tell us however, is equally important: It suggests there are many people like you, who read a good review, heard some good mouth-to-mouth, or were simply researching CMS’s. These people try out Joomla!, and of course some will decide it’s not what they’re looking for. The point is, it shows us that the community is very interested in the upcoming 1.5.

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