During FOSDEM an interesting conversation came up about what Drupal version the really big websites are using. Some seem to think that these monolithic installations like Linux Journal and MTV would be using Drupal 5.0. My take on it was that since it takes the better part of a year to build these web sites that they probably would never upgrade past Drupal 4.7. This also became a point of curiosity when we returned home.

Daniele Testa came up with an easy way of checking. Just look for the INSTALL.txt file in the web site in question. It seems no one deletes this file and it does contain a bit of information like the version and date of the file bundle used to build the site. We found that MTV and the others are still using Drupal 4.7. While other sites like theOnion are trying to disguise their installs by changing the "node" to "content" this in itself is a tell because you can't do this in Drupal version 5.0+. So it means they are still using 4.7

You can also do a Google search for Drupal with

I got about 86,000 Drupal installations on a search. Then go in and look for the INSTALL.txt to find the dates which lead to the version. This is a pretty good indicator of where Drupal stands against other CMS systems like Joomla and Typo3 who claim to have close to 200,000 plus installations. It also lends some reality to the numbers given by way of how many downloads a CMS has. Many download but not as many actually install the software.

Happy Publishing!

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