Re: [xwiki-devs] Back to the future of XWiki !

Hi Andreas, Thanks for your email. This is actually good material and we need more of it. As Jerome pointed out, I never said in my email I would go back to development. My objective is too involve myself in the "product definition" which means making a better product which fits more the market needs. I believe it has the objective to help us get XWiki less a "niche" product and making it more mainstream. If it means that we need to work on packaged distribution let's do it. If it means working on distribution this goes beyond "Product Marketing", though I'm also interested into that. I'm also getting more involved in XWiki SAS marketing and while we have spend the XWiki SAS marketing efforts more into showing a 'professional' face to potential customers, we plan to invest more time in open source marketing. As Vincent points outs this is also a collective effort as there is nobody better than our committers to get XWiki known in the tech world. I think we also need to clearly define out target. You mention "wordpress" but even if we can do some things that wordpress is used for, this is not what we are good at, and wordpress does not do what XWiki does. As Jerome pointed out, XWiki is about "collaboration". That's our market. That's what XWiki is good at. It's not any kind of collaboration, as XWiki's way of collaboration is different than what people have been used to. If we try to compare our "reach" with CMSs we will always loose, since these tools build public web sites and this automatically extend their reach. I think we need to focus on making XWiki known to people interested in collaboration, interested in bringing their organization to that type of collaboration. It's a collaboration that is: - social - a mix of unstructured and structured - flexible Making XWiki more known for that requires both more "distribution" and "communication" as you mentionned, but I also believes it requires more work on our end on XWiki itself. Not more work to start a "feature" frenzy, but to improve XWiki to more democratize it, simplify it for newcomers, making it's powerfull features more accessible to newcomers. For example, one of the most powerfull feature of XWiki since day 1, is it's internal Class/Object system which allows to create new data structures from the web. Unfortunately this feature requires a too steep learning curve. "App Within Minute" is not a NEW feature. It's the Class/Object system XWiki should always have had. Another example, "Dashboards". Dashboards is not a completely NEW feature. It's THE "modern" way of configuring a home page for basic users. I know we have plenty of "quality" refinements to do in XWiki, but we also have plenty of refinements to do that will complete XWiki for it's "purpose", and for what it's differentiated from other tools. I'm very open to discuss more what we can do both in the product and in distribution and communication to make XWiki more popular and widespread. You mentionned I was talking only about "features", and I supposed you refer to the "feature" survey. Actually the current "feature survey" did include "VM" distribution. So maybe we should extend the "feature survey" into an "effort survey", to actually discuss what we should spend our effort on for XWiki. So if you or others have ideas on what we should spend our effort on, please bring them on. Ludovic Le 04/03/11 10:48, Andreas Hahn a écrit : -- Ludovic Dubost Blog: http://blog.ludovic.org/ XWiki: http://www.xwiki.com Skype: ldubost GTalk: ldubost