February's forum stats : another record beaten

Not that forum stats are (by far) the only indicator of the project’s pulse, but let’s have a quick look into them nevertheless (@Ryan : some stats about modxcms.com would be great to have each month ).

After a great month in January with two record for page views and most online, we have beaten the 350 000 page views and crossed the 400 000 page views in February.

On the other hand, we have a big drop in new members for february, with 263 new members we fell back lower than October 2005. January was a all time high with 1347 new members (but following the 0.9.1 release, it was to be expected). This drop is not necessarily bad, since we have to handle the growth of the community. I think this drop is also most definitely linked to the fact we lifted the mandatory forum subscription to download MODx. We will most certainly have people try MODx, and then register to benefit from support or just drop out if they don’t like the app. One interresting figure here would be to calculate the difference between download count and forum registration :

For a given month :
MODx downloads - Number of registred users = new users (or roughly, don’t think many will download MODx 10 times)
New users - Monthly forum subscription = number of people who tested that dropped MODx.

It’s simplified but could be interresting to know.

Finally, it’s not in the stats, but I feel we have more and more skilled contributors joining and that’s a very good sign.

I am thrilled with how things are going. My wildest, most-optimistic hopes are definitely exceeded. Well if you don’t count maybe if the brunette from Lost were to join the team and start travelling with me to promote it full time, but that’s for ’07 I guess...



Observations :
Our February visits are down despite a good increase in the forum traffic. One could attribute this to the fact that we didn’t hit the front page of digg.com this month which led less folks to the general site. This is good in the fact that we starting to see the results of that exposure in increased forum traffic and active participation as David noted. February we had another instance of download manager gone awry on the 22, so we can probably use the number in parenthesis as our actual bandwidth number (about 58GB of bad/repeat transfers that day).

Jan top referrers :


I’ll post the February data tomorrow after it’s generated.

Tracking Alexa is even more telling though, espeically since it ignores Mac-weilding visitors like myself. We’re climbing steadily and have crossed over 37Signals in reach on more than one occassion. We’re generally always above Eto, Joomla, Textpattern and Movable Type (and Cake PHP). We trade back and forth with Typo3, and we’re squarely headed towards Squarespace, Mambo and Drupal, Ruby on Rails and A List Apart. The next level after that will be the much vaunted Word Press, and that will be a true testament of very good things when we achieve that. We’re usually in the top 20,000 sites worldwide daily now.

Marketing ideas for more awareness :
We need a project on SourceForge. Gee, how convenient (and so new the DNS hasn’t populated!):

Subject: SourceForge.net Project Approved

Your project registration for SourceForge.net has been approved.

Project Information:

Project Descriptive Name:  MODx CMS and PHP Application Framework
Project Unix Name:        modxcms
CVS Server:                cvs.sourceforge.net
Shell Server:              shell.sourceforge.net
Web Server:                modxcms.sourceforge.net

registered 2006-03-01 07:43

We need to get more blogs in the view of places like Digg and continue our outside project unmarketing. David’s doing an amazing job here, and those efforts leak over to other outside sources as well.

We could use the Framsoft article translated to English as I suspect that’d be a great seed article for putting up native language (and local) mini-sites that point back to modxcms.com. The link backs there will be crafted in such a way that our Google results in "content management system" should go up, which is important. We need a page dedicated to CMS and one to CMF on the site too (designer/developer targeted, respectively).

More thoughts soon... now it is time for breakfast. Great job and thanks everyone!

David,

Number of new registrations does not really indicate you got that many new users so to validate the number you also need to look at the last login date to see whether this user ever login and the login duration to get the whole picture whether we get a solid user of just some drive by user.

Good point Chanh, I took a shortcut here.

One thing I forgot to mention is it would also be useful to know how many zero post user we have, to really have an idea of the active user base (wild guess is around 200 core users, 400 average users and 800 to 1000 casual users).

@Ryan: I had no idea the Framasoft article (though it has received more than 20 000 visits) was even among the top referrers

I know I have said this time and again but I am going to do this translation (I’ll tell you what, I’ll even do that right now !). I also still have to finalize the marketing plan and really get things rolling now. I am a little frustrated that I can’t get things moving faster with Marketing right now. I can’t seem to find the time... the reason I have not been able to do just that is... MODx !

I have one MODx website up and running, 2 coming ahead in the next 3 weeks and also it seems I am somewhat victim of the buzz I have created around MODx in France, since I am getting a few companies to spontaneously consult with me about the advantage of using MODx for their projects rather than Joomla, Typo3 or Drupal. This is just incredible to me, if you consider I am very new in this business and with few references.

So far, given the kind of features the companies are asking for, if I end up actually getting some contracts I’ll most definitely have to ask for skilled help around here, especially for specific needs that needs coding. The good thing about this is that it could help sponsor the development of new features for MODx, as I would probably be able to convince the companies of the advantages of the opensource model and have them GPL those modules/plugin/snippets. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, buzz is buzz and can as easily drop as it has risen...

The Sourceforge page will really be a great booster, I am really so excited with this. Also, we have to work to take up of Chanh’s offer about writing some stuff for the great opensourcecms.com Many things to do, to few hours per day !

But enough rambling, I’ll shut down internet for an hour and translate the Framasoft article right now...

Edit : As it turns out, it’s not that easy to do a correct translation... while I can write decent english, I am way better in french and it makes it hard to translate this properly. Plus, I hate literal translations, they amount to nothing. I’ll need a bit more time to work this out, but I am on it !

David, get a quick first pass at it and I’ll do an edit ... how’s that sound?

Ok Ryan, will do it that way, don’t have a quick pass to offer yet though... it’ll have to wait tomorrow, it’s 2am there, going to sleep a little

well.. its a great read !!! WOW!