Hello,
Discussing with Ron and others, we came to the conclusion that there
have been a number of cascading factors which caused and still cause
Midgard not being as widely used as it could be.
(by user, I mean any kind of individual : developer, webmaster, ...)
Any input to improve the situation will be highly appreciated!
Here are the improvements (some of them already addressed or being
addressed) which could really multiply Midgard usage (I mean successful
installation + ability to quickly make a simple publishing site).
Order is the order in which the potential Midgard user finally ends
using Midgard after succeeding jumping number of more or less high
hurdles... Imagine the percentage of them falling on the ground at each
step, and you'll get the pict!
Step 1. : Finding the www.midgard-project.org site.
If you look at referring sites at Midgard site's logs, you'll notice
that the top list is made of 4 types of sites:
A. OpenSource Languages/tools "standards": PHP (Midgard is in the
PHP list of projects), mySQL (Midgard is in good position in list of
projects), Apache modules, Zend.
B. OpenSource products directories: Freshmeat (where hits are approx
the same as Zope's), DevShed, hotscripts.com, linuxapps, linux.org.
C. Search engines: Google (where Midgard is in the "content
management" category), Altavista, Webtop.
D. OpenSource news sites (thanks to MWS): linuxtoday, lwn, ...
If you have ideas about other sites of any type where Midgard could
be referenced, it will help a lot.
Step 2. : Once on the Midgard site, the potential user must:
A. Quickly understand what Midgard really is (the summaries or
articles the user can read during step 1. are very important too) and
how it can help him/her.
B. Quickly access links to important information from the home page:
- Download last stable version, last Beta version, current CVS
version. Actually, it's really hard to find other versions than 1.2.5,
and obviously 1.2.5 is the only one which is heavily downloaded by
people who are not "in the secret".
- Mailing lists (it's hard to find mailing lists now, I guess many
people do not use/subscribe to Midgard mailing lists just because they
cannot spend time to find it).
- Current online documentation.
Ron is currently improving the whole Step 2.
Step 3. : Easy to install
An installation script has been written to install Midgard in one
step. A "Plug and Play" installation is effective once there is no more
patch of the PHP parser, so it's possible to have Midgard coexisting
with already installed PHP3 or PHP4.
Step 4. : Easy to create simple site
New Asgard admin site and a good documentation/tutorial will help
users jump this last hurdle which will convert them to "an happy Midgard
user".
Regards,
Jean-Philippe.
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| Jean-Philippe BRUNON /-/=\ _ _ _ __ ___ _ __ __ _
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