Blog: May 2009

The 15 Largest ExpressionEngine sites May 2009

May 13, 2009

Update June 16: How popular is Korean celebrity news?  AllKPop.com is now the 10th largest EE site, and is growing like bamboo! I didn’t update the whole article, just the chart.

If you know of a large site, even if you think it’s not top-10 worthy, let me know in the comments or by contacting me.  Thanks!

Update May 20: After adding A List Apart, Kukla’s Korner and Gov.ca.gov, I decided to expand the list to the top 15.  The order is slightly different now.

Update May 15: I’ve had a number of good suggestions for big sites, and one has definitely made it into the top ten: Top Gear, the BBC racing show. I’m also tipped to two more “can’t-tell-you” sites about which I’m trying to find out. Stay tuned.

Clients often ask us, “Can your preferred CMS, ExpressionEngine, handle my HUGE site requirements? I’m planning to get [one gazzillion hits or something like that].”

The answer is yes (if you pay for proper hosting!), but it’s been hard to back that up with concrete examples of enormous sites, because there’s hasn’t been any single list of large, successful ExpressionEngine-powered Web sites. Well, that’s all about to change:  Here, then, is the definitive list of the 10 largest ExpressionEngine Web sites.

What exactly defines “largest”?  That’s a tough question, because a site that has a huge amount of traffic might be just one page.  Or a site that serves a niche audience and has a low Alexa ranking might have crazy active forums.  Consulting with other EE professionals, these factors seemed to be the most relevant ones that we should use to determine “largeness”:

  • number of unique visitors and pages / month
  • number of entries and comments
  • number of members and forum posts
  • awards and buzz

Combining all these data points gathered by investigating more than 50 potentially “large” sites, I came up with the ranking you see here, which was based on all the numbers I gathered plus a little bit of what I like to call “judgement” and you might call “shameful ignorance.”

Largest ExpressionEngine Web sites, May 2009

  1. Change.gov: Transition site for Barack Obama
  2. iLounge: All about iPod and iPhone
  3. Peri?dicos Z?calo: newspaper in Mexico
  4. Gear Live: gadget news
  5. Top Gear: BBC car show
  6. paidContent.org: news about online content
  7. BMI Music: music licensing and artist
  8. A List Apart: resource for CSS and design
  9. Campaign Monitor: email campaign tool
  10. allkpop: Korean celebrity news
  11. Truthdig: independent political news
  12. Grist: environmental news and commentary
  13. Kukla’s Korner: hockey fans
  14. Jewish Journal: large jewish newspaper in Los Angeles
  15. CA Government: central page for California’s Gov’t
  16. OpenGL: standards group

The largest confirmed traffic I was told of belongs to iLounge: 20,000,000 pages per month.  iLounge also has the most forum posts: a mind-blowing 1,300,000.  The largest number of entries I know of is JewishJournal.com: 70,000.  But there’s another site, ou.org, that apparently has WAY more entries—I just wasn’t able to confirm it.

Here are the caveats: I do think that Change.gov and Peri?dicos Z?calo might have higher traffic, but I wasn’t able to verify their numbers.  And you might consider it a bit of a “cheat”, but I’m including Change.gov as of its peak traffic in January 2009, not as of its May 2009 traffic. I also left ExpressionEngine’s own site out of the rankings, but they do have a very large site with a very large number of members and posts, and would rank close to if not in the top 10.  Other large sites include: Sundance Film Festival, ou.org, gov.ca.gov, abajournal.com and the Vancouver Public Library (which has more than 60 editors using it), but I wasn’t able to confirm enough information or they didn’t quite make the top ten.

The raw data is available for you, too, to look at.  Take a look:

 

 

Click here to view the spreadsheet directly

If you think I’ve left any significant sites out, mention it in the comments and I’ll research it.  The spreadsheet is a living document, so it may over time show a different ranking than the list in this article does.  Special thanks to the folks on Twitter who chipped in with suggestions, and to the folks who couldn’t help me on the record. Oh, and does anyone know of a similar resource for MT or WP?

Posted by Travis Smith at 11:28 AM | Comments (28)

The Reason Project Launches

May 11, 2009

Screenshot: Reason Project

After many months of planning, thinking and hard work, The Reason Project launched today. It’s a secular non-profit founded by Sam Harris, well known author of The End of Faith, and Letter to a Christian Nation, and his wife, Annaka Harris. Their official mission is thus:

“The Reason Project is devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society. The foundation draws on the talents of prominent and creative thinkers in a wide range of disciplines to encourage critical thinking and erode the influence of dogmatism, superstition, and bigotry in our world.”

In aid of that, Sam has assembled an amazing group of advisors, volunteers and contributors to amass and create compelling content. Some of the many highlights of this long-in-development site are: an Archive of Articles culled from great thinkers on secular values; The Scripture Project, an annotated wiki with the full text of the Bible, the Quran and the Book of Mormon;. and several rich and wonderful galleries of art and images.

From a technological standpoint, the Reason Project is perhaps our most complex site ever. Built mostly in ExpressionEngine, it includes a wiki with extensive customization to allow intra-page linking and automatic navigation, a forum and registration system with custom design and all sorts of collections of blogs, articles archives and photo galleries.  A SalesForce donation CRM system is integrated into the EE member database in a clever way, too. Overlaying the structure are many layers of member permissions, allowing the site to be run by dedicated volunteers who can administer most of the site without ever needing to access the EE control panel. It also pulls in content automatically from other sites via RSS and Yahoo Pipes. 

It’s an fabulous, ambitious undertaking, and Hop Studios is proud to be a part of it.

EDIT: The Reason Project changed its name to Project Reason.

Posted by Matt Gardner at 12:04 PM | Comments (4)

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