Tyler M, October 27th, 2009

Hop Studios has done a great service for us ExpressionEngine folk - they’ve published a list of the largest 15 sites using EE.

Wait a sec, what’s “large” anyway? Well, they’ve defined it by:

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

Good factors, but it’s not clear how they stack up against eachother. A couple of times we’ve had clients ask about how ExpressionEngine scales up for large traffic numbers. Here, Hop Studios quotes iLounge.com as having 20 million pageviews per month (as of May 2009), which is indeed popular. I’d like to check out the interactive features they’ve incorporated however, as I know things like commenting, user tagging, Stand Alone Edit Forms and, basically, any user input, can put a unique strain on these systems.

Anyway, here are the sites I was most surprised by out of the 15 mentioned/ranked:

• Change.gov: Transition site for Barack Obama - Go Obama.
• A List Apart: resource for CSS and design - Awesome site, one of my old favs.
• Truthdig: independent political news - Robert Scheer was one of Marc’s professors at USC and is a commentator on our fav podcast, Left, Right and Center.
• CA Government: central page for California’s Gov’t - because we all have an interest in how California pulls itself out of its financial mires and it has Schwarzenegger on the front page above the fold.
• OpenGL: standards group - as a gamer we all know and love OpenGL for providing stiff competition to proprietary dev tools from Microsoft.