February in review

Posted by Sigurd on 2 March 2007

As promised, here's an overview of SilverStripe over February...

1. Stable Release

February 3rd marked the first SilverStripe 2.x  release deemed stable enough for people outside the core development team (we've been making websites with the SilverStripe 2.x codebase for over 12 months.) On the same weekend I attended Nathan Torkington's Kiwi Foo Camp,  getting valuable insight and praise from various folk at Mozilla, Google, Radio New Zealand and Shift, as well as having a generally fanastic time.

2. Pollenate the web and party

Myself a few others submitted the release to a number of industry websites like sourceforge, cmsmatrix, opensourcecms (still yet to add us), and within a week someone overseas had written a  SilverStripe wikipedia entry. Cool! Our traffic wasn't doing very much until Dion at Ajaxian reviewed SilverStripe, which led to a massive wave of traffic (45,000 pages in less than a day) which led on to "aftershocks" at del.icio.us and stumpleupon (and a thursday night party at SilverStripe!)

 

In ensuring days we noticed the traffic sources quickly morphed from a few major sites through to a myriad of smaller blogs, forums and activity on the Wellington PHP mailing list, which certainly made our server sweat.

Here's a crude representation of how the sources of traffic changed over February. y axis indicates percentage of traffic. (Anyone know of a tool to do this? Google Analytics + AppleWorks proved fairly painful). 

 

	January	February
Visits	8728	40,874
Page views	102,986	428,763
Traffic	4 GB	50 GB
Downloads	204	2872

The server handled about 1.5 million page views during the month in total if you include the other websites on it. 

3.Build the community and listen to it

In the past two weeks we've been really impressed by the growth of the forum membership and the number of occasions where new users of SilverStripe have solved other's questions on installing and using SilverStripe. Thank you Asa for some tips on how to authentically do a good job managing this--you'll be pleased to learn we're hiring a new role...  open source community manager :) Based on an overwhelming request to add internationalisation and people stating they will supply portugese and other languages, we have earmarked this for version 2.1.

4. Buzz

It's been fantastic having strangers bump into us and know what we're up to. The last two weeks have seen us drown with companies wanting websites through us; plus major Wellington and Auckland webshops wanting to build sites using us. One way I can quantify this is how we've bubbled up from page three to one at Google for open source cms, cms demo, etc. We're also bubbling up within the top 100,000 websites (Alexa).

 

If you're in Wellington next week then you can bump into us at the Webstock Mini (Tues 6th) or the Wellington PHP meetup (Wed 7th).

 

 

2 Comments. Add Yours Tags: silverstripe company, community, new release, silverstripe software, event