German Community Site/Blog/whatever

[owzim]

Nice work so far. 

I was not active in PW-forums for some time, because I suffer on herniated disc (Bandscheibenvorfall). I'm so glad you did this site. 

Agreed nice work so far, some minor front end issues (best practice wise) though.  

@Nico any chance getting this site on github and let ppl make pull requests?

@thomassausen Get well soon!

[pwired]

Remember the days with philips video 2000 - betamax and vhs ? Philips video 2000 was technically the best system with the highest quality video, but, lost because vhs had the best marketing ! It doesn't matter how good a cms is, without good marketing it will not get known. We could copy marketing strategies from modx and drupal. Also a bit progressive marketing would certainly help. Something like: processwire = what modx and drupal should have become.

[fenton]

We could copy marketing strategies from modx

please not from modx. i find anything strategy/marketing related from modx rather bad, confusing and annoying

[pwired]

However, I must give modx the credit that during my time using modx, I learned really a lot from them. I think also their meetings with demonstrations in different countries and their ambassador program could also work for processwire.

[fenton]

Coming from modx my self, I think I know the feeling. However, I think

also their meetings with demonstrations in different countries and their

ambassador program could also work for processwire.

maybe. but it should grow by itself (grasswroots). "ambassador" ...*shudder*

all modx managed to do, was to alienate the community, surround itself with cheerleaders and throw around with empty buzzwords. IMO, I feel that processwire got the right energy and momentum anyway. no need to force/push harder

rather focus on making the product even better.

[typ9]

Remember the days with philips video 2000 - betamax and vhs ? Philips video 2000 was technically the best system with the highest quality video, but, lost because vhs had the best marketing ! It doesn't matter how good a cms is, without good marketing it will not get known. We could copy marketing strategies from modx and drupal. Also a bit progressive marketing would certainly help. Something like: processwire = what modx and drupal should have become.

VHS vs Beta: yeah, right. But with CMSes there is a good chance that more than just 1 will survive. Different industry. Different products... Though I believe that a bit more marketing would do good.

I just can talk for myself - but I was convinced to give PW a try by reading positive tweets and blogposts about PW by other webdevelopers - developers who I trust (mademyday and Michael van Laar were the guys that brought me to PW).

[ryan]

VHS vs. Beta, BlueRay vs. HD-DVD, etc. -- These are winner-takes-all markets. The CMS market is a totally different landscape. But I agree with the premise of marketing and the importance of getting the word out there. I also agree that we can learn things from the marketing of other related products out there. Though word-of-mouth is the best marketing there is, so I agree with Kunane that making the product (and support) the best it can be are great ways foster good word-of-mouth. ProcessWire is a community project rather than a business, so we don't have the marketing resources of for-profit businesses. But as we grow I think we'll have more and more resources to pursue new avenues of communication. 

[Joss]

Part of the trick is defining the target market segment.

There is an industry wide problem at the moment where market segments are very poorly defined. There are two reasons for this: Firstly, the majority of marketing is done by non marketing people, and secondly this is all very new and shiny and no one is totally sure what to do with it yet.

This even shows with companies like MicroGoopple - with the lack of strict market segments, they have all tended to go for scatter gun marketing in every area all at once.

With ProcessWire, the issue is "Is it a CMS or not?" 

Well, that runs into a problem almost immediately - what on earth is a CMS? Or, more precisely, who is a CMS for?

Blogger is a CMS. It is a straightforward system that allows people to manage content in a very precise and defined way.

Wordpress is a CMS. It works like blogger, except you can host it locally and make it work not like blogger at all.

Joomla is a CMS, except they would like to point out that it is a Framework with a CMS on top of it.

Drupal is definitely a CMS - it allows you to manage anything, but it is a hell of a long way off from Blogger where we started.

ProcessWire is a CMS - except it is a CMS that allows you to imagine and build your own CMS on top of it. So, it is not a CMS then?

Certainly, if all the other CMSs are defined by the fact that they are a central system where you can "theme" and build modularly using modules/plugins/whatever, then ProcessWire is possibly not a CMS - it is too flexible and does not have that same central construction mantra.

To a certain extent, it is a misuse of the term CMS that is causing all the problems. Out of the box, Blogger, Wordpress and Joomla are probably not CMSs, but AMS - article management systems. Since, unless you stick all kinds of third party additions to them, managing articles is all they do. 

Drupal is a bit more flexible out of the box.

So, it would help marketing if all those others would go off and re-brand themselves as AMSs and leave the more versatile offerings to use the term CMS a little more correctly.

Well, that is not going to happen - and in addition, there is quite a gap between what Drupal and Liferay do on one side and what EE, ModX and PW do on another.

We have seen in these forums a couple of newer people posting, with quite genuine reasons, that they are confused that PW does not have a theming system like Wordpress has.

It doesn't, of course, because it is not doing what Wordpress does - at least not out of the box. You can build a Wordpress out of it (I am having fun doing one at the moment) and you could even build a theming system to go with that - but that would be what you can DO with ProcessWire, not what it is.

To my mind, ProcessWire is, at the end of the day, not a CMS as such, or an AMS, possibly more of a CMF, but not even that totally.

ProcessWIre is really, a very strong starting point. If you want to develop a web tool of some description, PW is where you start. It allows you to get your visual interface and core data together very quickly and tidily and then gives you enough tools to develop a fine-grained approach to what you actually want to do with that data.

In a funny sort of way, it is, for the new browser orientated development world, what Desktop development tools were to users back in the late nineties. It does a lot of the heavy lifting for you while you get on with the presentation and fabrication.

So, back to the market - PW is a professional's tool. It can be used by amateurs like me and even quite effectively, but those with better knowledge are always going to be able to take development with PW far further and faster.

As such, I think it should be marketed in the first instance as a tool for developers/designers (I really do not like splitting those groups), while making sure it is accessible for those with less knowledge, but like to learn.

In practice this means presenting it to the development community through seminars and user-group meets, as well as making sure that each geographical market area has a common focus point (like the German website this thread is meant to be about) that can be used to gather in and grow local communities.

Now, this is where I lift the lid on what the marketing industry really thinks of this sort of product.

Basically, promoting open source systems is no different to promoting a rock band - you need fansites, reviews, groupies, and everything that goes with it! 

I am sorry, but I would be hard pressed to put a Rizzla paper between the marketing brief for a highly regarded Open Source system and one for the newest boy band. 

And having seen the behaviour of some developers on "other" open source projects, there is little difference there either!

Joss

[pwired]

Very well said Joss. Processwire goes beyond just another cms and thus it is going to be a very good starting point to define what processwire actually is, what it can be and do, for who and for what. Processwire can be put in a much wider perspective than a cms and that will promote it very well on a meeting and demonstrating it to new people. Look for example how Luis ported his php app office management suite to PW because of it´s flexibility, scalability and built-in user-roles. I think more examples of this kind would serve very well on the about page on the processwire webpage to show it more directly and openly. Actually it is already there under "What's unique" and "Why processwire" on the about page, but newbies can easily overlook what is actually said there. At least that's what happened to me in the beginning. After being left out from modx evo I started my journey to another cms and came across processwire two times. I didn't really see that the architecture of processwire is even more open than modx evo. If you can't imagine something it is hard to see it. It was only after hanging around on the forum, discovering to my surprise that I was not the only one coming from modx evo, going through the processwire basic website tutorial, that I had my "light bulb" experience. Long story short: put on the website of processwire that it is actually "a scalable modx evo on template variables steroids" and newbies will rush in more quickly and not miss the point. Of course I have put here just an example that does not cover processwire completely, but I think you get my idea. I think Luis ported office management suite to PW will be a good example. I'm sure there are more of them.

[ryan]

While ProcessWire is more than a CMS, I still think CMS is the best way to market it. That's what our target market is searching for. And just because the term means different things to different people, ProcessWire still fits the actual meaning quite well: "content management system." CMF is perhaps an even better term to describe ProcessWire, but nobody is looking for that. We are #1 in Google for the term "Open Source CMF", and our analytics don't prove this to be a term that anyone is looking for. Whereas, "Open Source CMS" is a rather competitive term (and we usually appear somewhere on page 2 of the search results). Even though we are more than a CMS the way most people know it, I still think it's the term that connects with the broadest audience. People looking for a CMS find a great one with ProcessWire. And when they are ready to do more, they'll find ProcessWire to be a tool they can continue to grow with.  

[Joss]

I was just messing around with something else, and I realised the term "CMS Framework" as a phrase is a nice compromise.

[yellowled]

Also don't forget that once the (relatively small) “market” of developers and designers is “exceeded”, the term “content management framework” is pretty useless. After that, the market to target is “end users, which are not devs/designers”, and those are very unlikely to look for anything else than a “content management system”. That's the term they know.