Dries Buytaert

Mollom launch coverage

It is now five days after Mollom came out of beta and some of the dust has settled, so I figured I'd give you an update on what people wrote. Here is a selected subset of some of the coverage we got:

• Peter Hagopian at InformationWeek: Mollom Comment Spam Solution Emerges From Beta. Mollom is currently supported by Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla, as well as the recent additions Radiant (a CMS built on the Ruby On Rails framework) and DaliCMS. Mollom seems to be getting better and better and it's nice to see it come out of beta.
• Mikkel Høgh: My six months with Mollom. Before Mollom, I’ve been using spam.module and Akismet with varying degrees of success, and when Mollom first came out, I wondered why we needed another Akismet, but decided to try it out to support Dries. The answer to that question is that Mollom is in fact not just another Akismet. Spam blocking is just one of the things it does. That does not mean that Mollom is not good at blocking spam. My experience is that Mollom is more effective than Akismet and spam.module combined.
• Growing Venture Solutions: Mollom - Out of Beta and Ready to Eat Your Spam (without bothering your normal visitors). The service is now out of Beta and available to large sites that need redundancy and volume analysis for 30 euros/month. That seems like a great deal and they've even got a better deal: most sites with limited needs who are willing to accept occasional server downtime can still get the service for free. Wonderful news.
• Jan Polzer at Maxiorel: Mollom: komentářový antispam a zkušenosti z praxe. (Czech article)
• Justin Miller at Code Sorcery: Mollom anti-spam service is out of beta. I've been using Mollom for a few months and have been very happy with it. If you run a blog, even one that isn't in Drupal, I would encourage you to check it out. It's free for many uses, so you lose nothing by at least giving it a shot.
• Josiah Ritchie: Mollom - The Bullet Proof Vest. All this means, the content on the site is pure, not diluted by the evils of this world. Pure, meaningful and trustworthy content means more activity from your visitors. If their experience in pleasant, not inhibited by spam checking devices or spent filtering spam themselves, they are much more likely to return.
• Robin Wauters at The Next Web: Mollom drops beta tag in quest to challenge Akismet. In the six months that the Belgium-based company has been beta-testing Mollom, they said to have blocked almost 9 million spam messages on thousands of sites.
• Glenn Paulley at Sybase: Fighting spam with Mollom. I’ve been using Mollom (as a beta customer) for several months for one of the websites that I manage and the effectiveness of Mollom’s techniques are impressive.
• Patrick Teglia: It's Best if You Don't See This. So, what makes Mollom different, from an end-user's point of view, than the other spam solutions I have tried (Akismet, Spam Karma, etc.)? Nothing, or rather, you have to do nothing, which is a whole lot less than what you do with the others. In fact, you don't have to deal with queues, moderation, constant attention and emails about all of the above. In other words you don't have to do anything. Oh, yeah, and the fact that it just plain works. I have yet to see a spam on my site.
• Robin Wauters at Tijd.be: Mollom niet langer in beta, krijgt er een betalend broertje bij. (Dutch article)

Thanks for the positive feedback, and I'm glad you like our service.

Google insights on Drupal

Recently, Google launched Google Insights. Like with Google Trends, you can just type in a search term to see search volume patterns over time, as well as the top related and rising searches. You’ll also have the ability to compare search volume trends across multiple search terms, categories (commonly referred to as verticals), geographic regions, or specific time ranges. Great for marketing people.

Below are some examples specific to Drupal ...

The numbers on the graph reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. See Google Insights results for Drupal.

In China, Wordpress is winning hands down. See Google Insights results for Drupal.

In my home country, Belgium, Drupal is almost as strong as Wordpress but not nearly as strong as Joomla. See Google Insights results for Drupal.

Regional Drupal interest by country. Google uses the term 'search volume index' for these heatmaps, meaning that they normalized the data by the total traffic from each respective region. In other words, just because two regions show the same percentage for a particular term doesn't mean that their absolute search volumes are the same. See Google Insights results for Drupal.

In the US, the west coast beats the east coast. Based on 'search volume index'. See Google Insights results for Drupal.

Regional Drupal interest by city. Based on 'search volume index'. See Google Insights results for Drupal.

The top search on Drupal -- great for marketing people. Breakout means that the search term has experienced a change in growth greater than 5000%. See Google Insights results for Drupal.

Mollom for Wordpress

Matthias Vandermaesen released a Mollom plugin for Wordpress. You can read more about it on his blog or you can download WP-Mollom from the Wordpress.org plugin directory. Thanks for all the hard work, Matthias!

YSlow

Yahoo! released YSlow, a Firefox extension that integrates with the popular Firebug tool. YSlow was originally developed as an internal tool at Yahoo! with the help of Steve Souders, Chief Performance at Yahoo! and author of O'Reilly's High Performance Websites book.

YSlow analyzes the front-end performance of your website and tells you why it might be slow. For each component of a page (images, scripts, stylesheets) it checks its size, whether it was gzipped, the Expires-header, the ETag-header, etc. YSlow takes all this information into account and computes a performance grade for the page you are analyzing.

The current YSlow score for the drupal.org front page is 74 (C). YSlow suggests that we reduce the number of CSS background images using CSS sprites, that we use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Akamai for delivering static files, and identifies an Apache configuration issue that affects the Entity Tags or ETags of static files. The problem is that, by default, Apache constructs ETags using attributes that make them unique to a specific server. A stock Apache embeds inode numbers in the ETag which dramatically reduces the odds of the validity test succeeding on web sites with multiple servers; the ETags won't match when a browser gets the original component from server A and later tries to validate that component on server B.

Here are some other YSlow scores (higher is better):

• http://wordpress.org: 78 (C)
• http:/drupal.org: 74 (C)
• http://plone.org: 64 (D)
• http://postnuke.com: 63 (D)
• http://typo3.org: 56 (F)
• http://mamboserver.com: 56 (F)
• http://joomla.org: 53 (F)

From what I have seen, Apache configuration issues, and not CMS implementation issues, are the main source of low YSlow scores. Be careful not to draw incorrect conclusions from these numbers; they are often not representative for the CMS software itself.

And it doesn't change the fact that drupal.org is currently a lot slower than most of these other sites. That is explained by drupal.org's poor back-end performance, and not by the front-end performance as measured by YSlow. (We're working on adding a second database server to drupal.org.)

CMS code base comparison

Drupal

Source: Drupal statistics at Ohloh.

Joomla!

Source: Joomla! statistics at Ohloh.

Wordpress

Source: Wordpress statistics at Ohloh.

Plone

Source: Plone statistics at Ohloh.

(These graphs depict statistics for the core of each project, and do not include contributed modules, extensions or third-party plugins.)

Conclusions

• All projects have been growing in size. No exceptions.
• Drupal has, by far, the smallest code base. It's lean and mean. Joomla!'s code base is about 8 times bigger than Drupal's. Even Wordpress's code base is larger than Drupal's.
• Of all tools, the Wordpress code has the fewest code comments. Drupal and Joomla!, on the other hand, have the best documented code.