This is a really great point Jake. If you're not evangelizing about CF every chance you get, when you interface with clients, potential clients, other developers, etc., you're doing both CF and yourself (in the long run) a big disservice. Anything each one of us can personally do to spread the word about CF and steer people towards CF when it makes sense to do so will help keep CF strong and viable. We'll all have a great opportunity to do this again when CF 7 comes out and we have lots of new and very cutting-edge features to discuss, but even now we all know the strengths of CF we can tout when faced with a fight between CF and rival technologies.
Cost-wise, don't ever forget that if it seriously comes down to someone saying "I"m not shelling out $1200 for CF when PHP | ASP | .NET is free," you can pitch BlueDragon. They have a free version of their server available for production use and it's about 99% CFMX compatible. Definitely worth looking into when you get into these discussions. CF also is starting (slowly) to have more and more open-source and low-cost applications available. There are now free content management systems, bulletin boards, blogs, and just yesterday with the release of DRK 9 a REALLY nice survey creation tool. This gives us even more ammo against PHP in particular because of the huge number of free PHP applications available. If you want to help CF, consider writing an application and making it freely available. The more of this stuff that's available the less argument people will have against CF. I was actually in the process of porting over a PHP survey tool when I saw that one's included with DRK 9, so this is a great sign! If you're just looking for extra projects to increase your skills, and you happen to know PHP or Java (or want to dig around in some code and learn), go to SourceForge (http://www.sourceforge.net), find a popular application or one you think would be useful to the CF community, and port it over to CF. Lastly, consider contributing to some of the open source initiatives that are going on with CF. The two main ones are OpenXCF (http://sourceforge.net/projects/openxcf/) and cfopen.org (http://www.cfopen.org), or you can contribute developer tools and components to http://cflib.org or http://cfczone.org The combination of widely-available applications and developer tools will help increase CF's muscle against some of the alternative technologies. End of rant--now get out there and do great things with CF! Matt On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 12:19:46 -0500, Jake <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Yeah, as someone who does community stuff or a living, its nearly > impossible to estimate community effectively. > > There are two things to consider: > - Size of the direct community (the actual active community members) - > this is easier to estimate by doing some basic information gathering > (how many people are on cftalk, and all the other big > lists/forums/communities), then making some assumptions about how many > active participants equal. I typically estimate 10:1 for every active > poster. > > - Effect of the community - this is where things get interesting... sure > there might be a good amount of developers, but how many of them are > telling companies to buy, or advising friends to come over to Macromedia > (or whatever product/service/thing). This is where the true power of > community comes in. This is where you convince a company that community > is important. > > Anyway, no idea if that info is relevant. :) > > Matt Woodward wrote: > > >There was an admittedly non-scientific discussion about this recently > >on the CF-TALK list, so you might check out houseoffusion.com to read > >the archives. This was in the past week or so, so it shouldn't be > >hard to find. > > > >I'm not sure I've ever seen any estimates from Macromedia. That would > >be very interesting to know. > > > > > >On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 12:01:39 -0500, Schreck, Thomas (PPC) > ><[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > >> > >> > >> > >>How big is the CF community? How many developers are there? Does anyone > >>have demographics on CF community? > >> > >> > >> > >>Thanks - > >> > >> > >> > >>Tom Schreck > >> > >>817-252-4900 > >> > >>[EMAIL PROTECTED] > >> > >> > >> > >>I have not failed. I've found 10,000 ways that won't work. > >> > >> > >> > >>- Thomas Edison > >> > >> > >> > >> > > > > > > > > > > ---------------------------------------------------------- > To post, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > To unsubscribe: > http://www.dfwcfug.org/form_MemberUnsubscribe.cfm > To subscribe: > http://www.dfwcfug.org/form_MemberRegistration.cfm > > -- Matt Woodward [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.mattwoodward.com ---------------------------------------------------------- To post, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe: http://www.dfwcfug.org/form_MemberUnsubscribe.cfm To subscribe: http://www.dfwcfug.org/form_MemberRegistration.cfm
