Pixelite: Drupal and the Open Web in the Australian Government – 2024 edition

This is the complementary blog post for my DrupalSouth Sydney 2024 session, and also v2.0 follow up of sorts from the original 2022 version. The full presentation was much longer than this blog post, this blog post is just going to highlight the core statistics and findings.

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Have you ever wondered how popular Drupal is in your local state and at the Australian Federal Government level? This blog post will help to answer that question, using open source tooling. The hope is that you gain some insight to the relative popularity of Drupal and appreciate more the impact you and Drupal have in Australia.

As this blog post is a follow up, you can also now start to see trends (data is around 13 months newer than the last time I did this).

Just show me the graphs

Disclaimer:

• This is based on Oct 20, 2023 data
• The scoring is based off PageRank data, so the percentages are not raw counts of websites, but an approximation of how important the respective sites are compared to others (assumes a logarithmic base of 5).
• Wappalyzer detection is not perfect (see the end of this blog post for upstreamed PRs), and there is still a fairly large portion of sites where the CMS cannot be identified
• MoGs make this tricky (PageRank relies on incoming links, which break due to MoGs)
• Only source *.gov.au domains considered (some Government sites use other TLDs)
• Unlikely newly created websites are in the top 10 million just yet (due to how the algorithm of PageRank works)

All sites (*.gov.au)

Federal sites (not state based domains)

Programmes like GovCMS are having an impact here. Also interesting that if you are not using Drupal, the chances are you have written something entirely custom.

Victoria *.vic.gov.au

The Single Digital Presence (SDP) programme makes a mark in Victoria.

New South Wales *.nsw.gov.au

Large Drupal sites like https://www.nsw.gov.au/ and https://www.service.nsw.gov.au/ help to make Drupal dominant in NSW.

South Australia *.sa.gov.au

Squiz Matrix increasing in market share ↑5.4% over 2022. There is a clear state led mandate here.

Western Australia *.wa.gov.au

A lot of sites this time around are now identified (decrease of ↓30.8% of unknown sites). Drupal also increased market share by ↑9.9%.

Tasmania *.tas.gov.au

The lowest usage of Drupal for any Australian state or territory and the highest percentage of WordPress.

Queensland *.qld.gov.au

Australian Capital Territory *.act.gov.au

The highest percentage of Squiz compared to any other Australia state or territory.

Northern Territory *.nt.gov.au

Open Source Software (OSS) CMS vs Proprietary CMS

For the CMS’ that can be identified, splitting them into 2 categories, OSS and Proprietary. OSS is determined on whether the source code is freely available, and there is a licence that allows me to run it without paying someone.

Drupal sites by major version

For sites reporting as Drupal, Drupal 10 is the most popular. Still 5.4% of Drupal sites running Drupal 7 to which will be End-of-Life (EOL) in early 2025.

Score by state and territory

This is weighted by total score, broken down by federal/state/territory.

Observations and other unusual findings

Drupal usage

“Drupal powers ~29.9% of all digital experiences that you use in the Australian government. This is↑2.7% compared to 2022”

Drupal Growth

“Relative to the growth of Australian government sites, Drupal adoption is growing faster”

Top contender

“Squiz Matrix is the top contender with 15.6%, and has a clear state lead mandate in 5 states/territories. This is↑3.5% compared to 2022”

Drupal 7 usage

“Drupal 7 usage dropped from 15.8% in 2022 to 5.4% in 2024. This is↓65.8% compared to 2022. Most popular Drupal 7 site is https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/”

Also after my presentation I got to meet the team behind the State Library of NSW, and they advised that they are due to upgrade to Drupal 10 anytime soon.

TLS coverage is still not 100%

83 sites with HTTP only (a drop of ↓46 since 2022)

Domain	CMS	Page Rank	Score
http://www.bom.gov.au/	unknown	5.63	8614
http://ips.gov.au/mailman/listinfo	unknown	4.68	1867
http://www.nntt.gov.au/Pages/Home-Page.aspx	microsoft-sharepoint	4.68	1867
http://ajrp.awm.gov.au/	hcl-notes	4.6	1642
http://services.land.vic.gov.au/	unknown	4.56	1539

If in doubt, add a number

14 sites with ww[0-9] in the domain name (a drop of ↓5 since 2022)

Domain	CMS	Page Rank	Score
https://www2.gbrmpa.gov.au/	drupal	5.3	5065
https://www1.health.gov.au/	unknown	4.99	3075
https://www9.health.gov.au/	unknown	4.59	1615
https://www1.aiatsis.gov.au/	unknown	4.53	1467
https://www2.sl.nsw.gov.au/	unknown	4.51	1420

I think this is often used like a form of poor mans version control, often archiving the previous version of the site. For some reason it is archived publicly.

I want the raw data!

If you want to make your own visualisations of the data, or even just do random queries “how popular is Spark CMS in Western Australia”, you can download a CSV from https://bit.ly/dsau2024csv. Slides are https://bit.ly/dsau2024.

Upstreamed enhancements

I found a lot of software running in certain states, so I upstreamed some changes to better detect these software packages:

• Better SilverStripe detection #120
• Datascape detection #122
• Spark CMS detection #123
• Jadu detection #126
• Engagement HQ detection #124
• Social Pinpoint detection #125
• Citizen Space detection #121

Comments

I am keen to hear feedback on this data, and what can be done to improve the scoring. Also, if you can help fill in some of the ‘unknown’ data, let me know, I am happy to craft another PR into WebAppAnalyzer.