Yesterday we were posted on our twitter account link to one interesting post which is about an attempt to estimate # of symfony community members. It was pretty fun to read the method of estimation as well as comments to actual post. We’d rather don’t agree with the method of estimation but overall conclusion seems to be correct.
We’ve decided to review some of our statistics here to get some idea on how many developers may use symfony at the moment. The most probably this # will include real symfony developers, guys who has to support symfony code written by someone, project managers who is interested in frameworks and want to know more. This number wont include guys who like Beethoven’s #3 symphony 🙂
So our site has been started in middle of 2006 which is approximately the time when symfony was at early beta stage and since that time we are publishing about symfony and tracking statistics of visits. Our Google Analytics says that since that time we’ve got more than 70,000 unique visits related to symfony. Of course, some of them is not really unique (it includes same persons which came from another PC, etc). We know that we have more than 1,000 RSS subscribers which are clearly unique users but it’s hard to imagine what visitors percentage which decided to subscribe via RSS. So symfony community is somewhere between 1,000 and 70,000 🙂
Now seriously: pretty good idea about bottom line of symfony developers could give symfony forum – I’m quite sure every symfony beginner at some point have some questions and symfony forum is the place where he can ask them. So when you go on this page you can see these symfony members:
290 pages * 40 records per page = 11600 members.
So that’s bottom line.. I’m sure the real number is much bigger (up to 70,000) b/c there are big number of forum visitors whose are able to find answer w/o registration.