Ranking of DNN core modules in terms of popularity

Note to CLUAS regulars:
The following blog post has nothing to do with music. And it may appear at first glance to be completely irrelevant. But it relates to the technology we use to run the site (DotNetNuke) which - it is sad to say - your humble webmaster is quite keen on. Read on at your peril and if you get to the end and go 'Er, so what?' you cannot say you weren't warned.

Recent email exchanges with other DNN Blog Module team members got me thinking about how popular the DNN Blog module is relative to the other 22 free DNN Modules (or "Projects" as they now seem to be called) available via the DotNetNuke mothership. Measuring "popularity" of a piece of software is an imprecise - if not impossible - science. All the same, I made a stab at it by assuming that number of downloads of a module is an indicator of popularity.

Each of the core DNN modules has a stats page on Codeplex (from where the modules are downloaded) and it shows you the number of downloads for each module over different stretches of time (for example here's the stats page for the blog module). I pulled the number of downloads over the last 3 months for each of the 23 modules and the table below brings all the data together, with the modules listed in order of average downloads per day over the last 3 months.

The most downloaded (or popular) module? That'll be the "Form and List (formerly User Defined Table)" module (with an average of 51.9 downloads per day over the last three months). Biting at its heels in 2nd place is the Blog module with 42.9 downloads per day in the same period. I am not surprised to see the Blog module with such a relatively high number of downloads. But I never thought it would be the Form and List module that would top the table (even if I for one have been very keen to deploy its latest version on CLUAS.com in order to replace the - dare I admit it? - FrontPage forms that are still used on the site).

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