Hi all,
I just have to share my frustrations.
----oOo-----
I got 2 emails from people that were very disappointed that they both missed
out on the GT because they were only watching the Cocoon website. One of them
mentioned that his manager no longer wants him to use Cocoon since the project
website is dead. These two people were visitors of last year's event, and I'm
pretty sure that there would've been many more people that missed out because
they don't read the mailinglists.
First of all, let me start by saying that I've made a really big mistake in not
updating the Cocoon website with news about the Cocoon GetTogether. Although
the Wiki does mention it, as well as the mailinglists, the Cocoon website has
no news to share. But it appeared to me anyway that the Cocoon news page is
actually never actually really read. (how stupid of me)
For example, if you take a look at http://cocoon.apache.org/news/index.html, it
says pretty much nothing.
Of course, I'll have to blame myself for not putting the GT on the website.
Which I do. But I must say that I've been working my ass off to get the GT
done, and I'm just a little bit disappointed that no one else came up with the
idea of putting it up on the website. Alright, I know, it's entirely my fault.
On the other hand, there's been the occasional blogposts (thanks!), and Carsten
had some postings in German magazines, but that was just about it.
Compare this with the 30 something people that Carsten got at (both) his talks
in Austin, and the 50 something in Dublin. Add to that the 90 people attending
the Cocoon GT of which 80% were totally unrelated to the Cocoon 'family'.
There's still a lot of interest in Cocoon from the outside world - we just do
not leverage it!
And then there's the really kind words that I got from Apache board guys at the
ApacheCon in Austin. Why is it so hard to drive 300 attendees to Austin for a
big conference on ALL Apache projects, covered by a huge budget, big names and
big sponsors, while we seem to easily reach 100 people every year for a silly
little conference in Europe without *any* serious budget??! I mean, Cocoon was
supposed to be OBSOLETE, wasn't it?
BTW, thanks for putting up the ApacheCon logo's on the Cocoon site. Neat.
----oOo-----
The discussion about a new design for our website is great, but I feel there
are much bigger mistakes that we have to get straightened out before the
shinyness of our website is of any importance. We need to decide where we put
what, as it's currently spread all over the place: Cocoon website,
mailinglists, the Wiki, blogs, zones.apache, Daisy documentation, etc etc...
----oOo-----
So here's my list of things that TOTALLY SUCK about the Cocoon website :-)
- Someone has to maintain the Cocoon News page. There are now 4 entries on the
page, spanning a total 2 years of news. That totally sucks! For a newcomer,
this is not a good sign. It would really help, if we got someone to add 1 news
entry every month, with 3 lines minimum. We've recently added a bunch of
committers to the project, which is perfect to show that we're not DEAD. Let's
put it on there!
- NEWS should be on the HOMEPAGE, not 2 clicks away from the homepage. I mean,
look at *any* commercial website and see how many clicks you need to get to the
news and marketing yadayada.
- Add Cocoon blogs to the Cocoon website (don't know if that would be a legal
issue, but it would surely add fuzz). Only the Apache incrowd reads
planetapache - it's just too far away from the Cocoon website. Let's move it
there where the community is. Just see the Ruby on Rails website. Why the dull
Cocoon "move on, nothing is happening here" look?
- Documentation (sorry, Helma). So, it was Stefano's dream to once have a
Cocoon CMS and run the Cocoon website with it. I don't think part of this dream
was to tuck it away on a hidden location so it will be forgotten forever. How
embarissing it is to see Helma working at the GT practically alone on all our
docs. This has everything to do with the total invisibility of the
documentation website. Let's bring it out into the spotlights. Let's give every
committer a login, or better yet, get Daisy to talk to the ASF's
authentication server (free advice Belgian guys).
- The Cocoon Wiki went DEAD as soon as it was moved to Moinmoin. What a sin. It
might have been for political reasons, I don't know. I believe the Cocoon Wiki
was once the brightest, most innovative and fun place to be if you wanted to
get your hands dirty with Cocoon. Whatever happened to the navigation bar we
used to have in JSPWiki?? Please! Let's put it back. I don't think I'm the
stupidest person on earth, but ever since the Moinmoin Wiki was launched I've
NEVER found ANYTHING interesting on it anymore.
- Make stuff easy to find on our website.. Without going into details, too many
things are hidden too far away. I'm very sure there's hardly any newcomer that
figures out that you should subscribe to our mailinglists to see what's going
on.
- And finally, I feel so sorry for www.planetcocoon.com and
www.spreadcocoon.com. Same probably goes for zones.apache, cocoondev.org, and
all the other nice initiatives people have launched to promote Cocoon. They've
all been too far away from the project itself, too scathered around the place.
I should even include www.cocoongt.org on this list, I mean, the whole Cocoon
conference website should be on the Cocoon website itself. Maybe this poses ASF
issues, I don't know. But even then, we should talk about it.
----oOo-----
To conclude, I think we need to move all our community efforts to the 1
location where people actually start to look when they are searching for
Cocoon: cocoon.apache.org.
And we need regular changes on there.
I guess I should've posted this before the GT, so we could've used the Hackaton
to get things fixed. But if that's what we need, then I suggest you all get on
that plane again to Amsterdam for a 3rd and 4th Hackaton day! :-) Heck, I'll
even order some pizza's!!
----
Arjé
