OStatic

Open source content management system (CMS) Drupal, is gaining many new types of users, but, as I've noted before, publishers, in particular, should look into it due to the cost savings that it offers over proprietary publishing systems. Part of my conviction on that front comes from the fact that OStatic runs on Drupal, as do publications such as InfoWorld, The Onion, and FastCompany. Now there are some interesting data points on Drupal trickling in from publishers using Drupal, and publishing industry analysts.?

We've written before about the projection that Drupal, the powerful open source content management system (CMS), may run more than 240,000 sites on the web by January of next year. OStatic runs on Drupal, as do many other well-known sites, including The Onion and Fast Company. Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal, has a post up on how Zappos, an e-commerce web site with more than $1 billion in annual revenues, is using Drupal. The Drupal.org site also has a case study up about how Zappos uses Drupal, which illustrates how flexible a platform it really is, and provides a lesson in how many sites using expensive proprietary CMS solutions could gradually transition to the many open source alternatives.

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.