Director @GoalGorilla and founder of @OpenSocialHQ, online open source strategist & board of the Dutch Drupal Association. Friends, food, drinks, adventures.

Apr 28, 2016

Some facts on the Top 5.000 Drupal modules

85,2% of the top Drupal 7 modules do not have a Drupal 8 version, and other fun facts and figures.

This series of blogposts is the introduction of my session on ‘Selling Drupal modules & distros’ at the DrupalCon New Orleans on May 12.
My aim is to identify the issues and current state of innovation in Drupal and to fuel debate on this important matter.

It’s easier to talk with with some data. So I paid a Python developer from Pakistan 150 euro to build a Drupal.org scrapper. We build in delays and only ran it on early Sunday morning, not to cause the Drupal.org servers any trouble (yes, I will ask the infra team next time and well, also just use this JSON feed of data instead of scraping.. ;)
I will share the raw data with all of you after DrupalCon New Orleans so you can play around with it yourself.
Note: We sorted all modules on ‘most installed’ at the Drupal.org Download & Extend overview and next scraped data from the top 5.000 module pages. the reported installs are all reported installs of all Drupal versions available.

Some fun (but otherwise pretty useless) facts from the Top 5.000 Drupal modules:

With over 900.000 reported installs the Views module is the most popular Drupal module, runner up is CTools.
These 2 modules are also the most downloaded modules with over 6 million(!) reported downloads each.
With 124 installs the Mail signature module closes our Top 5.000.
With over 100 mentions Dave Reid is Maintainer for the most number of modules. Token ranking #3 is his/their most popular module.
The 18 oldest modules in this list are all posted on September 29, 2003. I guess there was a migration on that day. Oldest top modules are a.o.: Variable, Devel and Redirect.
5 of these ‘old’ modules still have a Drupal 8 version as for example Devel and Redirect! Rock on!
The youngest top module (>30.000 installs) is the Responsive Menus module which was posted on the 3rd of July, 2013.
After Views, the module with most open issues and bugs is the Organic Group module with 2.280 open issues and 789 open bugs. Sorry guys..
522 modules of this list have only a Drupal 5 or 6 version, so no Drupal 7 or 8. Most popular with 71.596 installs the FileField module is the most popular one at rank #13! Most of these modules are not actively maintained.
With 8.691 reported installs the Admin Toolbar is the most Drupal 8 only module at the moment ranking #558.

And now some graphs:

69.5% of Drupal modules are under active developed.

66.2% of Drupal modules are actively maintained.

85,2% of the 4.420 top Drupal 7 modules do not have a Drupal 8 version

That is it for now! Some topics I will research in time to come:

Is there a long tail in Drupal modules usage?
How are doing with update our modules to Drupal 8?
What can we learn from data on Drupal distributions?
What does this data say about contributing and innovations in Drupal?
Is Drupal contribution privileged?

And more things you would like to know? Let me know!