Some stats on projects.ez.no

In a previous blog post called “eZ Publish meets Drupal: building a simple scraper script” it was explained how to use Drupal functionality in eZ Publish to develop a scraper script. The actual objective for developing this script was to gather detailed information about all the projects available on the projects.ez.no website, such as extension compatibility, repositories used, downloads, reviews, etc. The scraper returned a total of 836 projects. Extensions listed in the category “old contributions” were excluded from the list of projects retrieved. The total number of projects, including the ones formerly hosted on the “ancient” contribs section on ez.no is 1197. This blog post presents a summary of the data gathered, along with remarks and recommendations.

Top downloads

The number of downloads is listed as ‘Total download count’ under the tab ‘Downloads’. However, a number of projects also provide a link to an external repository, sometimes in addition to a downloadable file, sometimes without a download. Of course the total download count does not take in account external downloads and therefore it is impossible to really know which eZ Publish projects are most popular in terms of the download count. However, based on the ‘total download count’ counter alone, this list of the 25 most popular projects is as follows:

The most downloaded extensions should probably get some more attention on projects.ez.no, for example through a list ‘most downloaded extensions’. In addition, these projects could also be presented as part of the installation wizard of eZ Publish. After finishing the site installation, the new eZ Publish user could be presented with a list of popular extensions that he/she might want to install in addition to eZ Publish. In addition, I think a number of these extensions should be included in the eZ Market as well.

Review and ratings

Another way to measure the ‘most popular’ projects is through project reviews and ratings. The number of reviews has not been measured, but the number of ratings has. It turned out that the rating feature is not very often (103 times in total):

Reviews and ratings provide valuable information about extension quality to potential users, and given the amount of available extensions it is a pity these features are not used more often. It makes it much harder for inexperienced users to define a set of additional extensions required. There are several ways to get more extensions rated/reviewed, on a more regular basis: ‘pay tribute day – rate or review the extensions you use for your eZ publish projects’. A community based ‘review board’ could be established that reviews current extensions on a regular basis. Another solution could involve allowing e-mail subscriptions to projects, with the occasional e-mail request to review or rate the project. The current rating functionality requires an in-depth revamp.

Project activity

How often are projects updated? Each project homepage displays information about the last update (‘last updated’). The project update date includes file uploads, but also news items posted about the extension. Again, a lot of the activity may be going on in external repositories rather than on the projects.ez.no server itself. Using the repository log notices displayed under the ‘source’ tab it should to get some idea of the number of code updates. Unfortunately, due to a bug in the scraper that info was only partially returned, and thus loses some relevancy. On average there are approximately 7.5 project updates per month. That is excluding the months of July and November 2011, during which some sort of cleanup seems to have taken place.

Contributors

How many people are contributing to the projects? The total number of unique contributors to projects.ez.no is 297. The following people are in the top 25 of most active contributors. Note: the list only counts the number of projects where someone is listed as the leader, and contributions categorized as ‘old contributions’ are not included in the total count of projects. The list does not take in account the size of codebase of the projects submitted. About 50% of the contributors have submitted more than one extension. 

Compatibility

There are 266 different labels for indicating extension compatibility with eZ Publish. This makes it difficult to get an overview of all the available extensions for a specific version of eZ Publish. Converting this input from a text field into an option list would probably help. The following table lists the number of extensions that have been marked with a specific version number. However, the count is not accurate yet since the compatibility string could also read “version 3.2 and up” or “version 4.3 and higher”.

The table below lists the projects per project status. About 65% of the projects are currently stable.

Conclusion: Revamp of Projects.ez.no

The stats above should be integrated more visible in projects.ez.no to get a better understanding of community involvement in extension development and should be available on a monthly basis. Reviews and rating should be improved, as well as compatibility labelling to make it easier for new eZ Publish users to select additional extensions. Popular extensions should get much more visibility on share.ez.no and could also be made available in the eZ Market.

As announced by Nicolas during the partner conference in Lisbon 2012, projects.ez.no will see an in-depth revamp of the extensions forge, following an "Open RFC" process, gathering all input from the eZ Community (link to slides to follow). The Open RFC process will give the community a change to address some of the issues of projects.ez.no discussed above. In addition, the new Reputation Engine, soon to be launched in the eZ Community will also incorporate activity stats from projects.ez.no, leading to a global reputation acknowledgement in a fair way.

A big thanks to Nicolas for giving feedback on the first draft of this post.

N.B.: please contact me if you are interested in establishing an extension/project ‘review board’.