Drupal 6 Content Management System To Soon Run 240,000 Sites

Dries Buytaert, founder of the Drupal content management system, and co-founder of Acquia (which offers a commercially supported version of Drupal), is out with some remarkable statistics, here, and here. If you're unfamiliar with Drupal, it is a powerful open source content management system, and OStatic runs on it, as do many other sites, including Fast Company and The Onion. According to the latest data from Dries, based on the growth of the platform, there will be over 240,000 sites running on Drupal 6 by January of 2010, and that's up from fewer than 5,000 in July of 2008. Here are some more milestones for Drupal.

Because many sites running Drupal are hidden behind corporate firewalls, and for other reasons, one can't put a completely accurate number on how many Drupal sites there are. However, Dries says that sites reporting  back to Drupal through their upgrade modules are showing that there are currently between 100,000 and 150,000 sites running Drupal 6. The current number is expected to double over the next nine months.

Good content management systems have to take care of a lot of issues not directly related to what site insiders are posting. One of those issues is spam, for many sites, especially ones that run Comment forums. Dries reports that only five in every 10,000 spam messages is currently making it past the Mollom spam filters that protect many Drupal sites. Mollom was co-founded by Dries, and, among other things, is designed to protect social and other types of sites.

Finally, yet another major online publication has moved entirely to Drupal. IDG's tech site InfoWorld, which shut down its once-thriving weekly print version focused on the IT industry a few years ago, is now running on Drupal. As I've written before, I expect that a lot of other publishers looking at powerful, cost-smart ways to publish online will switch to solutions such as Drupal. The open source content management systems are getting better by leaps and bounds.

For more thoughts from Dries Buytaert, see the recent guest column he did for OStatic on the future of open source.