Who is using Joomla? Does our survey tell us?

In April and May of 2007, Joomlashack conducted the first ever major survey of Joomla Users. Over 3,600 people filled out 31 questions ranging from how many Joomla sites they managed to what Joomla tasks they do most often.

The Joomla survey results confirmed many things about this powerful open source CMS, and also had a few surprises. Here are the results with some Joomlashack editorial observations!

We asked several questions about the background of people who use Joomla. Here are some of the results of those survey questions.

The vast majority of people work in the private sector, or run their own businesses. Perhaps one of the more surprising results, this seems to imply that Joomla finds more users in the business community than the non-profit world. One possibility however, is that these are web designers using Joomla for their clients of all types. More on that later...

A significant number noted that they were in that ubiquitous "other" category. Digging deeper into that data reveals no common theme. More respondents claimed "webmaster" as their role than "designer." This seems to reinforce the notion that Joomla is for more than just designers, and is a true robust CMS.

A multiple selection question about computer skills offered some interesting results. Over 50% of respondents said they had programming expertise, PHP and MySQL. It appears there are a lot of developers taking advantage of the well documented API for Joomla.

We also asked a couple of questions about people's specific background with Joomla.

The Joomla experience of respondents is fairly evenly spread. One item of note is that Joomla is not yet two years old (September 2005), so the 16% of users that say they have been using it longer than two years are really saying they started with Joomla's predecessor, Mambo.

OK, so we'll assume a survey about Joomla has people that use it, but regardless, the result does show the popularity of the next few CMS's among respondents. Obviously the Joomla result is over-inflated as this is a self-selected sample :)

Some of the more interesting results from the survey came from questions about the type of sites that people have been building with Joomla. We asked a number of questions on this topic.

In the first of two questions, we see that the overwhelming number of people are involved in more than one site. This seems to confirm some of our earlier findings that Joomla is heavily used by web designers and developers creating sites for their clients.

This follow up question shows that most of the sites that respondents are involved in managing are powered by Joomla.

Among our respondents, Joomla is still most used for small traffic sites. There were a few sites getting over 5,000 visitors a day, which is notable and impressive. That's a lot of traffic for a site, roughly equivalent to an Alexa rank of under 20,000 (I think). About 100 sites fell into this category (if you are one of them, please contact us so we can provide some links!).

Our last questions were specifically about the CMS itself. Here we asked about people's experiences using Joomla.

Not surprisingly, everybody works with content. It's a CMS after all! Based on the previous observation that many of our users are webmasters, we see a lot of commonality with some of the other basic functions of running a Joomla website.

The top result here is not very surprising. Templates are the most obvious thing people will hack, to change their logo etc. Other results seem to lend more weight to the idea that Joomla is used by developers and web designers. About 50% of respondents said they had hacked either a module or a component.

Clearly the commercial world of Joomla is alive and well. Over 50% of people have used some sort of commercial extension, and many have taken advantage of professional support.

It's been frequently asked to what extent the official Joomla forums are an accurate representation of the Joomlaverse. If these result are an indication... it is. Almost 70% of people said they have used the community support available at the forum.

To take a big picture view, it seems that Joomla is still used for the most part on small sites, and by technically literate developers and designers. Hopefully as we see the next generation of Joomla (1.5) grow and mature we will see the CMS jump this gap of ease of use and become the most powerful CMS in the world AND the easiest to use.

We will also be making some of the raw data available for download. First we have to make sure it it throughly scrubbed of any personal information of respondents.

You can discuss the results of the survey in our forums.www.joomlashack.com/component/option,com_smf/Itemid,183/topic,5869.0

Here at Joomlashack we're very happy with the response to our first ever Joomla survey. Check out www.joomlashack.com this month when we announce the winners of our survey competition!

Wondering where to go next?

• How about downloading Joomla 1.5?
• Why not make a donation to Joomla?
• Get a professional template from Joomlashack.

The graphs in this article are licensed under a Creative Commons license, BY-NC-SA. You are free to use in a non-commercial setting as long as you attribute them to Joomalshack.