The folks over at Joomla have achieved a new milestone for the CMS/blog software by announcing that the platform has finally surpassed the 6,000 mark.
While their total third party extensions pale in comparison to WordPress and Drupal’s inventory (which as of this post total at 11,731 plugins and 6,752 modules, respectively), the Joomla crew are boasting higher downloads than their rivals.
The Joomla! Extensions Directory (JED) reached 6000 published listings this week. We wanted to take a moment to share what that means and additionally give an overview of how the JED statistics compare with both Wordpress and Drupal. […]
Here’s the real picture… While there are more add-ons listed in the Wordpress directory, the number of downloads in the Joomla! Extensions Directory is far higher and more than double the average per extension! Drupal’s data is incomplete, but included is an educated guess based averages of their provided usage data. (Joomla! Community Portal)
According to Joomla!’s stats (as shown below), 138,976,526 extensions have been downloaded compared to 124,149,718 WordPress plugins despite having about half of the available custom third party extensions/plugins.
Despite the apparent frenzy of third party extensions, traffic to WordPress.org (which hosts the WP directory) dwarfs Joomla’s according to Compete.com stats (note: Quantcast shows similar results as well).
Despite having a slow start, third party extensions could be Joomla!’s means of breaking into the mainstream (something WordPress has done already), although they may have to make the platform easier to use for non-geeks in order to appeal to the masses.
Although Joomla is on the verge of eclipsing Drupal for the silver (at least as far as the number of extensions/modules are concerned), the platform still has a long ways to go before catching up to its WordPress rival.
Either way it looks like WordPress may have to fight Joomla! for the mind share of developers in the not so distant future, especially if the latter is able to match WP’s plugin inventory.
