Buzzr, our platform for simplifying the creation of sophisticated websites, has been in development for more than a year now. Yet even though we aren’t public yet, tens of thousands of sites have already adopted software from the project. More than 100,000 sites, we estimate. How? Open Source.

For this of you not too familiar with open source technology projects, a word of explanation is necessary. Strange as it may seem, we’ve released, free of charge, interesting parts of our work (“modules”) well before we were ready to release it on our own site. We’ve also contributed extensive work we’ve done on existing modules to make them much better.

The work ranges from making it easier for website visitors to vote on content they like, to making it easier to create a custom form, to making it easier to configure a website to begin with.

The open source deal is this: you can use the module for free, but once you come to depend on it, you’re probably going to want to see it working well. So you help by reporting bugs, submitting patches and making suggestions. And we end up getting free help supporting our work. Below, I’ve listed some of the modules we’ve created or done a great deal of work on, along with some usage statistics.

We’re building Buzzr leveraging the Drupal project. A big part of what we’re doing is creating a usability on top of Drupal, as well as integrating a bundle of Drupal modules that work as a simplified solution for creating, hosting and running websites. You can see a preview of the work here. http://buzzr.com/buzzr-demo-video-making-drupal-usable

We have lots more good stuff coming. And if there’s a particularly important feature you hope becomes part of Buzzr or one of the modules we release on Drupal, please let us know!

Thanks to the entire Lullabot team, including Karen Stevenson, Nate Haug, Jeff Eaton, Angie Byron, James Walker, Jeff Robbins, Addison Berry and Matt Westgate for their work on these and many other Buzzr tools.

New Modules:

jQuery UI ; SimpleViews ; Views Attach; Views Gallery ; Form Builder;

And here are some of the modules we’ve made significant contributions to:

Embed Filter ; Fivestar; jQuery Update ; Multiblock: Voting API

Sample Usage Charts: