Share your Joomla usage information with the community
- 24 May 2017
As most people would know, the release of J! 3.5.0 arrived with a new plugin called the System - Joomla Statistics. For some people the “news” of this plugin was displayed as a kind of “hassle screen” on the Joomla Control Panel; the notification won’t disappear unless you do one of two things: (a) disable the plugin or (b) set and save the Mode with one of the three options (viz. “Always Send”, “Send Once” or “Never Send”).
A screenshot of the plugin is shown at right (click the image to enlarge it).
It’s probably a reasonable bet that a lot of Joomla users disabled the plugin or set the Mode to “Send Once” or “Never Send”. Why they might do that is their own business but it’s also a reasonable bet that they were either (a) “fearful" that the information transmitted from their site to joomla.org might be a security risk or that it might generate a lot of traffic, or (b) they were ignorant as to how this information might be used. It’s a pity that people, in their ignorance or “fear” didn’t do their own research.
I wish the information about how many sites are using Joomla (and what PHP environments and databases it is being used with) had been collected for more than just the past fourteen months; that’s just a matter of history. While we can only speculate how many sites are still using versions of Joomla pre-dating J! 3.5.0 (as a proportion of the total number of Joomla sites in existence around the world today), the information gathered by the System - Joomla Statistics plugin—insofar as it has been enabled where users are unconcerned about its effects—is very revealing.
The information tells us an interesting story about the uptake of Joomla since J! 3.5.0 was released. For those who take some interest in who’s using Joomla, who’s using the latest version of Joomla (and who’s still yet to update their sites for over a year or more), who’s using what version of PHP, etc. the data is summarised in more-or-less “real time”, chart form at https://developer.joomla.org/about/stats.html.
See the screeshot at right (click the image to enlarge it).
I understand that people will enable or disable the System - Joomla Statistics plugin as is their want—although it’s not much use enabling the plugin if Joomla is installed in an operating environment that cannot connect to the internet—but I would encourage more people to share their experience with the community. It’s not just the developers who may benefit (by knowing how well each version is being taken up); we all benefit, especially when we see the adoption of new versions overtaking those that have been around for a long time. This shows us that Joomla is alive and that people care about properly maintaining their websites … before asking questions about problems they’re having with old versions that most of us have long forgotten about.
