How odd, just after I purchased 6 books and make a bussiness descision of getting Bart and Ton to keep the Dutch translation up to date from now on this article comes along.

I think that the community contest on writing a navigation template was just too hard for someone who is not used to WebGUI. I actually looked at it for two ours (I was in for the carma, not for the 600 euro's) but it was just too hard to think of something cool that would actually do something (this was not an acme contest).

The other thing with the community contests is that most of them have not been 'easy'. A good community contest to start next would be 'the one who creates the most, in quantity, not quality, different style themes'.  There are only 6 of these themes in the get addons section.

With WebGUI lite 2 euro per month (24 euro per year) might be doable.

If all of WebGUI's users were as involved and dedicated as the Dutch teams, then our community would be very strong.  Unfortunately, you're in the minority.

You guys rock! 

Ok there are two types of contributions.

1-Buying products.

I did that, both support and books in the past. The support has become more expensive and the so have the books, now they are printed which is something that is not that big a deal for me.

Bottom line is you have huge price gaps in your support and documentation products. From less than like 60$ or so you jump to 1000$ for support. You need more products ( whatever they are ) in the middle. Printed docs are a headache for people that live in countries like mine where shipping will take forever and customs will take too much :)

In addition to filling the holes in the price ranges of your products, why not make a donate for recognition product. I would pay 20$ or so for the sole purpose of having it said ( and linked back to me ) that I donated to WebGUI development. I think many people would do for the recognition not something you would make huge money with but every little bit helps and this could be automated.

2-Contributing work.

I sometimes help with the forum for the sole purpose of getting karma and spending it on RFEs but things have been very slow in the forum. 

As for designs, well most of the ones I do are based on comercial templates that we buy and make compatible with WebGUI so I can not contribute these back.

This brings me to another point if you want a nice product I would be willing to pay for GOOD WebGUI templates.

As for code all the code we do is tooo specialized and tooo little.

I have programmers, they always would rather write new PHP code than do a macro or wobject with WebGUI ( we never did do a wobject ). They are too afraid of perl and of WebGUI. Better programmer documentation would help a lot. Also better debugging and logging would help.

If you need to open new revenue streams then maybe you should think of having non-free extensions to WebGUI. I know many people will go crazy saying this is bad, but EzPublish does that and they have been around for a long time.  If you offer real quality stuff that we could not really get in another open source product that I would have to pay for then I would pay gladly if it serves me.

Ehab Heikal

 www.elmotaheda.com , www.mashy.com

Quote: An eye for an Eye only helps make the whole world blind

Gandhi

I'm going to leave a suggestion that might piss you off.  Sorry if it does.  Here it is:

Stop making it so hard to use WebGUI.

OK, so let me back that up with something constructive, and some experience.  I went through CMSMatrix, and found WebGUI to be the best match for a website I'm doing for a local recycling group (pro bono).  I'm also run an open source consulting company and am running it on our server gratis for that group.  By way of training, I'm a perl hacker, though I did more in the past than now, but I've written a few mod_perl apps in my day.

And *I'm* finding it really hard to get into WebGUI.   I got it installed, I even installed mysql on my server (I use PostgreSQL for everything else - I'd be happy if you used a database abstraction layer), and installation wasn't too hard just following the directions (I tried the WRE first, but the source install worked for me).

But then I'm trying to figure out how to use it.  The easy route seems to be to spend $35 and wait for a manual, but here's how Open Source works in every company I've done work in (many):

• Somebody comes up with a requirement, suggests big commerical software package.
• Sysadmin shakes his head, goes to Google,  downloads something, installs it, and sets it up for basic functionality.
• Does a demo.
• People agree it's good, he hands it off.
• For complex apps, people get training, buy books.

Downloading a $35 manual pretty much stops the process right after 'installs it'.  He doesn't know if the app is right for him, and even if he does he knows the stuff in that first book won't be looked at again after it's learned.  So he goes on to Joomla! or something with open documentation because it's 2 o'clock, and he needs to pick up the kids that day.  I know a guy who inherited a WebGUI install and dumped it because he couldn't find his way around inside of a couple hours.  I'm guessing that reduces the potential size of your community by 75% or more.

But I like your featureset and I'm quite stuborn.  So, I'm muddling my way through, trying to set up a basic demo page.  I edit some content and save it, commit my changes, but they never show up on the main page.  I try adding calendar events but they don't show up either, even though perl and mysql crank along for far longer than you'd expect.  (I even had a perl process run away on me - I killed it after 8000 minutes of CPU when I found it later.)  At this point I can create users, delete content, and not much else.

So, I go to the community wiki.  Search it for 'calendar' and find one thing about getting iCal updates to happen ("what, I have to do something else?").  I click on the Table of Contents and find it barely organized and consisting mostly of edge cases.  I'll appreciate them at some point I'm sure, but right now there doesn't seem to be anything on why I can't create events. 

So, over to the message board.  There appears to be six pages of posts for a 3 year period, and nothing about calendars.  For an open source project that's like nobody is using it.  But I read the main website and see that lots of people are using it.  "What's up with that?," I wonder.

I really don't know what kind of percentage of revenue you guys do from your manuals, but I am glad to see the servers and VPS you're offering now.  It might seem like the old canard, but Services is where it's at in Open Source, plus selling the same thing over and over is a great model.  Not to mention diversification.  Kudos.

And as a guy who has a bookshelf full of open source books, I think it would be great if you guys could get with a big Open Source publisher and get a 'Running WebGUI' in every bookstore.  Nobody I talk to has heard of it, inside Open Source circles.  (I found it initially by looking for a mod_perl-based CMS, but that's not common.)  Just briefly glancing through my books, I see about 200, but none was purchased to learn how to get started on something - they all came when I wanted to expand my skills.

And I even have printed copies of stuff I can download online.  Call me old fashioned, but I like reading high-resolution reflective material, and I can sit with it in the comfy chair pretty nicely.  Most users hate reading online documentation, especially the stuff they refer to day-in and day-out.  You might be surprised at the number of users who you'd think 'know how to do that' and still have a hundred sticky tabs in their reference manuals.  And at that, you're still going to sell manuals to that sysadmin's users once he gets the thing up and running.

Now it could be that I'm alone in my experiences, or it could be that I'm typical.  From the examples you give you have too small of a community for such a rich product, so I'm guessing I'm typical.  In most open source projects, 80% of the people do nothing.  That's just how it is.  Some of them are 'tards, but many of them contribute to other projects, so while they might be freeloading off your project, they're contributing to another, perhaps one your project is based on, etc..  But the #1 indicator of a OSS project's long-term success is momentum, not feature set or correctness. (Lord knows you must see this with the success of some other steaming-pile CMS's)

I realize what I'm suggesting might challenge your existing business model, and that can be too frightening to embrace.  And you might be obligated to not do things deemed too risky, or feel it would be irresponsible to change course, and as a businessowner I can totally understand that.  But at least play with the numbers.  Do some what-if's on different scenarios and see if anything makes sense.  I think you've asked a really important question, though slightly wrong - it's not "how do we get our community members to contribute back?" (some of them are already doing it), it's "how do we grow the community?".

Beyond that, there might be value in doing some usabilty studies with man-on-the-street-type of folks.  Chapter 10 of Krug's "Don't Make Me Think" may be useful here.  Actually, he has lots of great ideas on user interface design I wish I knew when I was writing those mod_perl apps a few years back. :) I think it's Paul Graham's site where I learned the metric, "a 10% increase in usability leads to a 50% increase in userbase" (all things being equal).

I wish you success no matter which way you proceed - just thought I'd offer my view from 10,000'.

Your rant is long and winding, so I'm not sure I get this gist of it. But I think I've found the relevant points. I will try my best to address them. Sorry if I missed any, but as I said your response was winding.

You think WebGUI is too hard to use, probably for other reasons too, but mainly because you can't figure out where your content goes after you hit commit. And also, why you can't add events to a calendar.

I assume you saw this page in our wiki: http://www.webgui.org/community-wiki/source-install else I'm not sure how you performed a source install.

The reason that your content just disappears without anything happening is that you either didn't start or didn't configure spectre properly per the source install instructions. From the command line try this:

cd /data/WebGUI/sbin; perl spectre.pl --test

That should prove my point, so I'll say no more. The WRE sets this stuff up for you pretty much automatically, which is one of the reasons why we recommend using it.

On the calendar you're absolutely right. There is a usability problem. This is also true of collaboration systems. You cannot add entries to either until the base asset has been committed. We either need to find a way to allow you to add posts to them before it's committed, or put a big sign up on an uncommitted one saying "Commit this asset to add posts!" 

You have some problem with Plain Black's business model, but I'm unclear what the problem is.

I can't tell here what you think our business model problem is. Are you arguing for free documentation? Do you think that we intentionally make things hard so you have to buy books? Whatever the case we're not trying to make things hard for our users and we do provide free documentation in the form of the wiki, which we populated initially and it's up to the community to maintain.

Regardless, questioning Plain Black's business model is one of the easier ways to get on my bad side. You have no idea what I've gone through, mulled over, or tried. We're not an evil company, but we do need to make money so we can pay our employees for the jobs they do. If you don't think it's fair that we pay our employees and that we ask people using WebGUI to contribute to that payment by purchasing our products and services, then I'm afraid WebGUI isn't the place for you. 

You think we don't have very many users.

We have tens of thousands of users. Granted we could always use more. But even by your math, there's no where near 20% of our user base contributing back, so I put up a post asking why.

You think that ease of use is our biggest problem towards adoption.

I'll be the first to admit that WebGUI isn't as easy to use as it should be. We have a couple things working against us in this area.

The first is that everybody wants something a little different out of WebGUI. I know we can't please everybody, but as you said, you like WebGUI's feature set. That's because of 10,000 people before you contributing ideas on what WebGUI should be. When you have that kind of power, it's hard to put a user friendly wrapper on it. Not that it can't be done, just that it's not easy.

The second is lack of time. We're not a huge company like Microsoft or Oracle. We can't put 1 million person hours into R&D each year. But we work really hard to put out the best product we can.

We're working on it, and it gets better with each release. For example in 7.5 workflow and versioning are hidden from the user to start with, because most people simply don't need that kind of power. And if you look at the roadmap, we have a more streamlined interface planned. 

However, even these two things are not our biggest problem with lack of adoption. Because ease of use isn't our biggest problem. WebGUI is designed to be an enterprise system and it's enterprise features have enterprise system requirements. Therefore Joe User can't install it on a $2/mo hoster and build his personal home page. So he instead picks up one of the smaller crappier systems that were designed to run in a small hosting environment. When his boss asks him to recommend a CMS for the company, he recommends the steaming pile that he used for his personal web site, because that's what he knows. That is our biggest problem with adoption.

With that I hope I've answered your rant. In the future less ranting and more idea generating in the form of RFE's would be appreciated. If you find something hard to use, make a suggestion on what would be easier in the form of an RFE. Ease of use RFE's are ones that I personally give the most weight to, and are some of the quicker ones to be implemented.

I'm sorry you chose to read my reply as a rant rather than a narrative, and to color it in that light, but apparently I stepped into a taboo in the process, and I'm sorry if I upset you.

To be clear: I want you guys to make tons of money.  Gobs of it.  Big cement swimming pools full of it.  I thought that hoping for a 3x growth in the size of your user base, your having a bestselling book, selling more manuals, services, and wishing you the best of success were self-evident enough, but somehow that was perceived as my thinking you're evil and that you shouldn't pay your employees.  I honestly can't see how you got there but I hope this clarifies my position.

It was my purpose to try to suggest what I saw as an opportunity for you to pick up the community-minded end of the open source community.  The problems I cited weren't meant as a cry for tech support, but rather to illustrate what one of your potential customers' experience might be like.

I wasn't trying to get on your bad side, but if suggesting tweaks to your business model is going to do that, I'll just leave it alone.  In the tradition I ascribe to everything but a man's integrity is subject to question, as a means of betterment, but I will endeavor to be more sensitive.  It seems that you're comfortable with the current situation of having the enterprise end of the market and you don't want to change the way you're doing things.  Fine, no arguments, it's your perogative, but I thought you were angling for the community end of the market where contributors tend to be.  But, if you're not willing to make any changes, I can't see why you'd expect the community to change.  I suppose I misunderstood the point of your original blog entry.

$perl spectre.pl --test
Running connectivity tests.
Testing mysite.org.conf
Tests completed. 

But upon further investigation yesterday I found that my problems stemmed from spectre.pl running away (when it pegged the CPU for a couple days) and there were many thousands of bogus/duplicate Webgui::Asset::Event entries in the database for a few recurring events.

I was going to chase this down, but I'll respect your wish that 'WebGUI isn't the place for [me]' and limit my further involvement with WebGUI to a reply here, should it be necessary.

-Bill

Hi Bill,

My name is Tavis Parker and I'm a partner here at Plain Black. I've talked with JT and a few other people about these posts and wanted to clear the air about JT's response.

I read through your initial post and can understand why JT interpreted your message negatively. It may not be obvious from your perspective, (which you stated was 10,000' away), but JT and the rest of our team at Plain Black are constantly barraged with complaints and requests for free books and documentation.

Mainly this is because people make the false assumption that because the WebGUI software is open source and freely available, that Plain Black should give away the books/documentation/training materials for free. However, these products require a substantial investment of money and resources to produce and we obviously have to recoup our expenses in order to be a lively business entity. Otherwise, we can't pay salaries, benefits, office space, fund new features, or cover the expenses related to operating a company of our size. Seems like a simple concept right? Lets continue.

The other reason JT and Plain Black are often "on the defensive" is because there are several supporters of competing CMS products who choose to engage in negative campaigns which spread false information about WebGUI and Plain Black. We think this is out of desperation since WebGUI's features and functionality make it far superior to a vast majority of CMS solutions available today. We're disappointed that a small percentage of individuals resort to these kinds of actions but we can't say we are surprised. The problem is that it does often times put us on the defensive when we are not sure of a person's real intentions.

As you stated in your initial message, WebGUI does have an amazing feature set and we're extremely happy and proud of the product that is available today. The person who is the most thrilled to give you WebGUI, is JT Smith. I realize you two have your signals crossed at the moment, but JT is about as modest as it gets. When I was brought in to Plain Black as the Vice President of Marketing, I told him that part of the reason WebGUI wasn't as publicly known in the CMS market (as it should be) was because of that personality trait. Plain Black was not bragging to the world about who was using WebGUI, how they were benefitting, and etc... We're now in the process of changing that and we're already seeing more exposure due to these changes. However, there's much more to come!

Now, the reason JT responded to your message in a frustrated mindset was because your message sounds like you are asking for more free documentation or a free book. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt when I read your post and I tried to convey that to the other staff who held the same belief. Your message would have been received much differently if JT would not had assumed that you were one of the hundreds (if not thousands) of people that have asked for "free stuff" since 2001.

Now, this brings me to my final point. Please understand that it's 3am, I'm exhausted, and I'd only be writing this response if it was important to me that we clear the air here. I'm assuming you had good intentions and were interested in contributing. Keep reading.

The free documentation available on WebGUI.org was started by Plain Black and then turned over to the community. While Plain Black *occasionally* makes contributions/updates to the WIKI, it's accuracy and scope are largely based on the community's participation and activity. But that's no small task!! Plain Black staff have gone through most of the major WIKI posts such as (installation, updates, etc..) and have verified the process is correct. However, often times people do not follow those directions or do not even try and search for them. The free documentation is not complete and we rely heavily on the community to help create/maintain/validate the information. We know there's room for improvement and that's why we're asking for help and contributions from the community here! :) 

So, this is where my "call to action" comes into play. Based on feedback and questions that I have received from potential customers, I feel there's probably quite a few people who are not finding many of the free resources and documentation. There's always room for improvement and I can definitely see opportunity here.

Therefore, I am issuing the following invitation to Bill, and anyone else in the WebGUI community who is interested in helping out with this important task.

The goals will be three fold:

1. Ensure visitors of webgui.org can easily find and download the appropriate version of WRE or WebGUI. (*nix, Windows, etc..)
2. Ensure visitors of webgui.org can easily find and download installation instructions for each type of install. (windows, *nix, WRE, WebGUI source, etc..)
3. Ensure visitors of webgui.org can easily find and reference ALL of the FREE support resources and documentation available to them.

If we can accomplish those 3 tasks, then that should accommodate a large percentage of individuals who want to evaluate WebGUI and minimize frustration and roadblocks. And once they are able to test drive it, they can make an informed decision about the product and whether or not they want to proceed by purchasing books and services. Naturally, we only want people to purchase books and services if they are happy with the product! Otherwise, they're going to be unhappy customers and that won't help us spread the good news about WebGUI!

So, I hope this (very long) email response has given you some insight into why you received a frustrated response from JT. I'm not saying you deserved it but at the same time I hope you can understand his point of view and the assumption he made. Obviously, text is a hard thing to decipher and context is often misunderstood.

Bill, if you really do like WebGUI and believe in the principles of open source, then I encourage you to join me in helping to make the initial process easier for the road ahead. I think you'll find the opportunity rewarding and the community outstanding. :)

Regards,

Tavis Parker 

PS - if you were actually just trying to argue that our commercial books/documentation should be free, then I'll edit this response w/ our cookie cutter email template which includes several swear words. Just kidding. 

Hi, Tavis,

 Thanks for your kind, metered reply.  I believe you understand the essential bit of what I was trying to get at, that WebGUI is hard (or was for me at least) to download and evaluate.  I'm pleased to see your positive stance with regards to organizing this information, and I believe it will benefit your community.

 This wouldn't be an appropriate task for me, personally, as I'm not knowledgable about WebGUI, but if your community can do it, fantastic.

 I guess we have a somewhat different opinion about the degree to which an open source developer ought to participate in a community-accessible documentation process; in the event that the community doesn't pull through for you, my intuition would be that you'd be at a disadvantage for not having an easy set of directions for configuring a WebGUI install and understanding its operation, for potential customers to evaluate.  If I were in your position, I'd make something basic available for evaluators under a non-duplication license, with the expectation that increased understanding would lead to an increased user base, which would lead to increased sales - but this seems to be a countervailing opinion.

 Is that 'giving away books for free'?  Well, maybe - but if you give away one copy of a book and sell fifty because of it, is that a bad idea?  Again, your call, your business, I'm not gunning for any sacred cows, and obviously you have market data that I don't have.  For all I know you've studied this approach, done the math, and it's a really stupid idea.  I was just trying to offer a perspective on what would have helped me, and lots of people I know, like me, who could be potential customers.  And I recognize that you have limited resources and target customers, and that might not look like us.

I guess that covers where I was coming from, so I'll leave it at that, as it's now 5am here (I had to get some CMS up and running tonight for this project) so I hear your pain. :) Again, best of luck to you and your crew, and thanks for being part of the open source economy.

 -Bill

It seems there is a lot of problems due to WebGUI installation blues. Let me suggest one thing that I would be happy to see. I would be the last person to benefit from it since I have been installing WebGUI for 4 years now ( or is it more ).

VMWare. Simple.

The installation for demo instructions would be.

Download free vmware player or server if you do not have them.

Download the VMware image.

Fire up the image and login to the desktop with such and such username and pwd.

fireup firefox to localhost

Viola!

VMware is making demos so trivially easy in a world where 400mb downloads are trivial.

Pick a lightweight desktop maybe even UBUNTU strip off unneeded stuf and keep firefox, flash and WRE with latest WebGUI installed.

Now this is a perfect way to test WebGUI for individuals but if they need to put it online, they still need hosting from PB.

Hope this sees light of day. 

Ehab Heikal

 www.elmotaheda.com , www.mashy.com

Quote: An eye for an Eye only helps make the whole world blind

Gandhi

Hi. I don't know if this will help, but here are some thoughts on increasing the community and making webgui appealing to corporations.

I came across http://www.sakaiproject.org/ and it seems to be a vibrant community, I don't know if that may help with some ideas.

What originally sold me on webgui was the drop and drag feature within webgui and the videos you had on your website that showed how to use webgui. Maybe updating those, and reposting would help? And actually the involvement of your community, it is much more active than others I've seen. So you're doing ok!

Webgui is very different than other CMS systems. perhaps an explaination of it's philosohy would help. I think you had a video on that too at one time, and that was EXTREMELY helpful when I was starting out. It actually took me a while to understand that I make a pagelayout and can put any type of assets on the page. As simple as that is now that I've used webgui, it was a foreign process to me - other cms systems don't do it that way.

The other stumbling block was the install process. I was using 64-bit platform, and doing the source install. It took a long time (two weeks), but I prevailed! and it was worth it. There were hardware problems too that didn't help.

I think what scares corporate companys into investing into choosing opensource is not understanding it's benefits and probably quite frankly there are bad opensource project out there. They may even be afraid that they would be left hanging without support. Where as Microsoft lives forever, right? I think many are left wondering where you get your funding, and how you can provide free software and still make money, they are looking for the "catch".

I really liked the presentation here for the sakaiproject: http://www.sakaiproject.org/media2/2006/overview/overview.htm He touches on a bunch of topics, but the end, he talks about opensource, and how it works. They also distinquish between "community" and "foundation" so maybe doing somethingn similar would be helpful?

I dunno. Just a bunch of random thoughts and ideas. Hopefuly you can glean something from this.

LN

Yay!  Those old videos helped me a lot, both technically and I think it would help you alot explaining your philosophy. Especially when webgui approaches things differently than other CM systems. You guys really thought this project out very thoroughly.

LN 

some other random thoughts:  I was looking at your change log, and it looks like you have newsletter functionality. maybe people would appreciate a bi-weekly newsletter with:

• tip of the week (user submitted?)
• latest bug fixes
• summarize content here: http://www.webgui.org/wg/contribute
• latest wiki

This would then maybe show off that there are contributors, and your community is live and well. Maybe that would encourage the silent ones to join in?

It seems that you are relying on people to visit your site (pull) for info. Perhaps add more "push" and give the info out to the users. using rss feeds, newsletters, etc.

Maybe have "send this page to a friend" functionality? or is that out of vogue?

Maybe give an explaination somewhere as to why one would want to have a login to your site? - what are the benefits? (seeing the blacklog - for one!)

One other thing that was confusing to me as a new user was the cross linking between plainblack.com and webgui.com. I found it confusing, but I choose not to let it bother me, and at the time, it seemed had a lot of broken links. I just assumed that webgui was managed by a bunch of programmers ( I hope I'm not offending anyone), as opposed to marketing people, so it didn't really bother me enough to turn me off.  I'm a more f a programmer, and I'm definaly not a web designer, so it was interesting to me that I considered baseing my decision on a company's website. I guess they are right: first impressions are actually important. Somewhere I read that you recently hired a marketing person, so that is good. I look forward to the changes! From my experience as an end-user, I think the content can be rearranged for better presentation. I would be happy to offer ideas if you'd like. Sometimes getting inside a end-user's mind helps.

I think that's it for now. Hopefully something will pop out as a "good" idea.

LN

As far as tip of the week goes, we already provide the forums, wiki, and IRC for people to talk about those kinds of things. Do you really think that a separate mechanism is warranted?

And you can already email/rss subscribe to the other stuff you've listed. 

I guess we could do the send this page to a friend kind of thing. That may be useful. I very rarely ever use that sort of functionality, but perhaps I'm in the minority.

As far as why it's important to have a login, maybe that's something I should cover in the coffee talk videos.

I don't know of any broken links between plainblack.com and webgui.org, but if you know of some please let me know. As far as separating the two sites, it may be a bit confusing that the two sites are linked together, but don't you think that having two sites is better than it used to be where we had just one site that contained all 60,000 pages of content? I think having the two sites makes it much more organized. 

We spend a lot of time trying to figure out where stuff should go on both sites to make it easy to find stuff, but with as much content as we have it can be a task. The other problem is that every user expects to find things a little differently than someone else. That said, what would you reorganize if I were to give you free reign? 

JT,

I think elnino has some great suggestions. I, too, would like to see a packaged "Tip of the week" that I could have my employees and clients sign-up for. The Send-to-a-friend feature is kinda useful, but I don't think that's the most pressing issue for the webgui.org site.

I agree that splitting plainblack.com and webgui.org was a great improvement. It is odd when an old link takes me to the plainblack.com site, but I'm used to it now. As for rearranging the content on webgui.org, I think providing a more directed experience to a new visitor would be useful.

Like elnino, I think providing a VMWare image would be a huge help for folks wanting to demo WebGUI. Plus more and more companies are using VMWare for managing servers so some of them wouldn't need to do anything more than deploy the image into their server farm.

BTW, the videos sound like a great marketing tool we could use when suggesting WebGUI to our clients. 

William 

----
Knowmad Technologies
http://www.knowmad.com

Tip of the week is not something my staff has time for (beyond the stuff we're already posting the black blog and staff blogs), so it would need to be generated by the community, and since this whole thread is about stimulating community it seems like a chicken and egg problem.

Rearranging: What you've said doesn't help me. What specific changes would you make.

A VMWare image is something I want to do, but it's a lot of work to keep it up to date. I've been looking for a way to script it, but haven't found a good way to do that. Maybe I could just put one out that does get out of date, and is only updated a couple times per year, and maybe that's ok. 

Videos: That's the idea, although, they'll also be talking about Plain Black services, so I'm not sure if they'll be appropriate for your clients or not. 

Hi JT,

I guess my point was that there are two types of marketing push and pull. I forget which is what, but it seems you are doing mostly of one kind, where the other would also be benificial too.

As far as broken links go, that was about 4 years ago, I think you may have been doing a transition of some sort - maybe you were splitting up the sites?. Things are much better now. It was just *really* frustrating at the time- point being, first impressions are important.

The more I use webgui, I see the benefit of having the two sites. I do once in a while get redirect to the home page of plainblack.com, I'll try to make note of that when it happens again.

Give me some time, I'll look at your site as a "whole" and see if I can come up with an organization that may help. I don't remember who mentioned it, but having a developer site would definately be appropriate and a good start.

Re the wiki? I love it! It's still a baby though, to help it along,  I wish I was able to take the really good posts from the discussion boards, and transfer them to the wiki, and then delete them out of the discussion board. While both have there purpose in life, as a user, they seem to conflict in content - because the discusssion board has been historically used as a "how to". So where does a user go?

I really like how mysql did their documentation. They have online doc, but then they have a discussion board at the bottom of each page. - so the "documentation" is mysql "ordained", and the discussions portion at the bottom, just makes the documentation better. example: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/6.0/en/update.html

LN 

Dear JT,

There are many interesting aspects we could discuss if we're talking about how we get the community involved. My personal favorit is policy. But let's not discuss that in abstract. I'm going to try to do a few contributions. In all those cases my goal will be to get something (changed) in the standard distribution. But there's the goal and there's the process. What I hope to achieve in the process is that I, and many other potential contributors, will learn what to do to get there. What I hope what you - and others - will do is to discuss what conditions you think should be met for such a contribution to be acceptable. So the second goal will be to get a discussion that clarifies the policy, so a potential contributor - and the whole of the community - can develop a plausable intuition of how to do develop things that are in line with the direction WebGUI is going. 

Each will be of a different kind, so we will learn the most. This is the first:

1. As a company, United Knowledge, I would like to (let somebody/contractor/company) build a specific commerce plugin. I cooperate with Procolix (Koen) to fund it. What I would like to discuss is: what demands do we think commerce plugins should meet? Perhaps we should commit ourselves to maintain it as a company, that we adopt it.

I will make a post about this on the dev_list tomorrow.

Kind regards,

Arjan Widlak

United Knowledge
Internet for the public sector

www.unitedknowledge.nl

Fair enough. Many of our contribution policies are already published in the wiki. Perhaps instead of being there they should be a main menu item.  

Regarding your commerce plugin, if it's something small you can just briefly describe it, and post it to the dev mailing list. If it's something bigger then I'd need a specification of what you're going to build, post the spec to the dev mailing list. If you just want to get a general yay/nay on whether I'd like such a plugin to be in the core, then again just post it to the dev mailing list.

For development you can create a branch in subversion to track your changes. After it's approved you'll need to follow WebGUI Best Practices (build tests, i18n, templates, follow coding rules, etc) for development.

When it's all written then it will need to go through a final quality check by me before it's merged with the main branch.

All of this may seem excessive, but I do it because I want only the best possible code and features going into WebGUI going forward. In the past I let a lot more slide, but we've been paying the price for it in bug fixes, incompatibility, upset users, and maintenance for too long.

Hopefully I've answered your questions. If not, feel free to reply. 

Hi JT,

No, it's never about a general yay/nay. That's a point in the policy that's already clear to me. It's the reasons that should lead to a yay or nay, so one can learn to know in advance if there's is going to be a yay or a nay. So one can learn to think more than one step ahead. 

Kind regards,

Arjan Widlak

United Knowledge
Internet for the public sector

www.unitedknowledge.nl

JT, 

Going back to your request for suggestions on reorganizing the webgui.org site, I think there could be a separate Developer Zone like MySQL.com has at their site. Just tracking down the latest link to the API docs takes me more than a couple clicks. Some of the documentation in the wiki about doing development could be extracted into a page or three of general information including the guidelines you mentioned to Arjan.

Speaking of the wiki, I don't think the wiki should be split out into user and developer versions but agree with Bill's remarks that it's unwieldy for a new user. It's a bit like a petri dish for fermenting new ideas and documenting edge cases. I don't think it's polished, easy-to-digest material for new users.

From your remarks, the wiki is where you envision the former online documention being moved. We're still mourning the loss of the online help system. Despite its warts, it was easy to use and had basic info about the asset being edited. The wiki hasn't caught up with that old system in terms of completeness or organization.

Currently, I think the wiki only works for those who have drank the kool-aid and made the investment into the WebGUI platform. I wouldn't suggest it to one of my end-clients as there is no organization or structure to the material. Our solution is to give our clients a copy of the Primer, provide basic training and a few hours of support during the first month.

William 

----
Knowmad Technologies
http://www.knowmad.com

Now we're getting a bit off-topic, but...

The organization of the wiki is poor, yes, but splitting it into multiple wikis won't stop people from adding poorly-organized content.

Once we implement subscriptions (watch lists) to wiki pages, then we can have people who are devoted to maintaining organization of wiki node (Editors, as it were).

Hey preaction, why do you think this discussion is heading off-topic? I thought it was about contributing to WebGUI which is what the wiki is all about.

At any rate, I was not suggesting it be split. I was suggesting adding a developer zone to the webgui.org site. To that suggestion, I was trying to say that I did not intend for the wiki to be split. This led me to more discussion about the wiki than I intended when I started the post, but I felt it relevant as the wiki had already been mentioned by the OP.

Glad to hear about the watch lists. That will allow people to take ownership of the wiki. Unfortunately, it won't add organization as there was in the old online help system which had a table of contents, an index and hierarchical documentation arranged by asset type.

Don't get me wrong, I love wiki's. We have 3 of them at our company for storing corporate docs, job aids, technical cookbooks, client info, vendor lists, and other miscellany. However, there is something about being able to store information in a structured format (e.g., directories or folders) which the wikis I've used do not provide. For online documentation for a system as large as WebGUI, I think that's vital. I'm sure order can be imposed upon a wiki but it's not the natural flow.

Now, I am getting off-topic talking about pros and cons of wikis so I'll stop and get back to working on a test for the new JSON library that's giving everyone headaches.

Cheers!
William

----
Knowmad Technologies
http://www.knowmad.com

I agree that the wiki isn't ideal, but the help system wasn't either. Almost all of the help is still in WebGUI in the form of hover help. The stuff that was removed is stuff that's more article driven, which the wiki is better suited to. In addition, the help was eating up a lot of ram per process, which is just a big waste. Plus people kept wanting to add more and more to the help. It was never meant to become a book, and it was becoming a book. 

Anyway, the decision to remove the separate help pages (not hover help) is final. It's not coming back. So instead of talking about that, let's talk about what we can do to the wiki to make it a better help system. Would the ability to maintain hierarchy in the wiki make it a better help system? If so, that could be done. What else?

JT,

Good point about the hover help still being available; that is a very useful feature and one that I miss when I go to other systems.

I only mentioned the old help system to highlight the effectiveness of it. Would it be possible to add the help icon back with a link to the relevant page in the wiki? I would think that hierarchical categories would help facilitate the linking. This may also boost the use of the wiki when a user knows that a page for the asset exists and has an easy way to access it.

So, yes, I think that hierarchies would be incredibly useful! I found a feature list for Mediawiki which discusses its "Structures and syntax". It has a concept of subpages as well as multiple categories. Here's a quote:

    "Category pages automatically list all pages assigned to them including sub-categories."

If we could do that, we'd have a drill-down table of contents for the assets (and anywhere else). So, those are my 2 ideas for making the wiki into a better help system. Thoughts?

----
Knowmad Technologies
http://www.knowmad.com

At this point I wouldn't be willing to put individual help links for individual assets to the wiki into WebGUI. It's too easy for people to change URLs and then it would break. I think in order to do that we'd need to have some sort of permalink mechanism in the wiki. 

In the mean time though we could definitely change the help link in the admin console to point to a help index page in the wiki rather than to the front of the wiki. 

I think it would be good to skip the whole category page concept and just include a small nav with each page that would show the pages below this one with a link to the parent. By having a real nav I would think that the user could more easily traverse the wiki hierarchy. 

Knowmad wrote:

I only mentioned the old help system to highlight the effectiveness of it. Would it be possible to add the help icon back with a link to the relevant page in the wiki? I would think that hierarchical categories would help facilitate the linking. This may also boost the use of the wiki when a user knows that a page for the asset exists and has an easy way to access it.

I actually think that something like this, in other words, to add a link inside WebGUI to the 'online help', is a really good idea. It could also mean a huge boost to the dutch community by tying it into the internationalisation and linking the dutch users to the dutch webgui-help.nl pages.

Koen de Jonge - ProcoliX
http://www.procolix.com
Hosting - WebGUI - Virtualization

Hi,

The post about the payment plugin is on the dev_list. 

2. The second thing I would like to contribute - and would like to see in a default webgui install - is a new template-set for the collaboration system. We're half way creating a website for our customers called 'webgui-help'. It's a tutorial and help site for content-managers, not for designers or developers. We use a flash-slide show that we've bought a licence for to display the screen shots. A macro in an AssetProxy generates the contents of a collaboration system as XML that is requested by the flash file. It's nice, but we're not completely happy with it.

So we are going to let a company develop another, next week, as free software under the GPL version 2, like WebGUI. This enables us - and perhaps the whole of the community - to keep enhancing it. It would be nice if this macro, the javascript to check the flash version, the swf and fla and the templates were an integral part of WebGUI so this works out of the box. 

As with all of my contributions in reply of this blog post, I don't quite know how to contribute. So I will post my assumptions and questions tomorrow in the etcetera list. I guess that's where this discussion belongs?

Kind regards,

Arjan Widlak

United Knowledge
Internet for the public sector

www.unitedknowledge.nl