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A Drupal User: Wake up community - Wordpress.org should scare you!
In the second of my Wordpress vs. X series, I offer Wake up community – Wordpress.org should scare you!. It doesn’t actually scare me, but I thought it was relevant because of Destry’s recent thread.
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Re: A Drupal User: Wake up community - Wordpress.org should scare you!
A decade ago, when Drupal was just getting started, most communications was happening on their dev mailing list. The look of their site, docs, etc., was not important to us early adopters, we just wanted to run dynamic sites. Fast forward ten years, we have millions of people getting on the net, and we’re all wondering why most users are heading towards WordPress.
The writing on the wall happened, I would say, about 4 or 5 years ago, projects like Drupal and Textpattern needed to keep pace or they would become niche products. Now, what do we do? For Drupal, it’s going to be hard, just because of the size of their organization, but for Textpattern, it’s an easier uphill battle.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Textpattern is in the best position of any project on the web to gain new users that are kicking tires or are thinking of changing brands. Just 1% of these users is an explosion that would benefit all of us, plugin, theme and web developers alike.
Today, Open Source is not a hobby, it’s a business.
We Love TXP . TXP Themes . TXP Tags . TXP Planet . TXP Make
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Re: A Drupal User: Wake up community - Wordpress.org should scare you!
projects like Drupal and Textpattern needed to keep pace or they would become niche products
What’s wrong with that?
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Re: A Drupal User: Wake up community - Wordpress.org should scare you!
maruchan wrote:
What’s wrong with that?
Because niche products eventually disappear, you may have a loyal few who’ll hang around till the end, but it’s not enough to sustain it in the long run.
Let me illustrate, I have OS/2 experience, but in today’s world, you need to know Windows, no matter how much you may think it sucks. Which is the situation we have in the CMS world today, it’s Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress that have the mindshare, every other system, no matter how well coded it is, or how loyal a following it has, is fading away. It’s been happening since the start of computerdom, and will continue till we’re all borgs.
What I’ll miss about Textpattern, is it’s simplicity, because in my view, the 3 major players are a bit heavy for my tastes. Yeah, we can continue with the code, since it’s Open Source, until one day keeping up with PHP and MySQL releases just seems like too much work, and then we’ll have to make the switch. And we’ll be on BuddyPress, starting a thread, remember Textile?
We Love TXP . TXP Themes . TXP Tags . TXP Planet . TXP Make
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Re: A Drupal User: Wake up community - Wordpress.org should scare you!
Bert
I think I see where you are coming from. And I appreciate that you agitate to keep us on our toes, and examining ourselves.
Here’s where I agree (if I am understanding you correctly). Subsistence requires a certain level of retention of the current user base and an adequate inflow of new users to replace those that have left. Yet that isn’t actually sustainability. Sustainability requires loyalty, but it also requires a certain level of energy and momentum. It requires a high level of retained user base combined with an user inflow that is greater than replacement requirements.
Open Source projects require that energy and momentum for long term health. Being intentional about developing and retaining your user base, promoting the great project you are and the benefits it offers to market makers and influencers, and so forth are all part of creating mindshare that leads to long term sustainability.
However, I disagree that niche is inherently unsustainable. While certainly many niche products and projects have demonstrated they lack the ability to survive over time, niche by definition is often why a project can survive in the shadow of the “big dogs”. Whether companies, stores, churches, etc., small often can prosper next to large. It has more to do with owning the mindshare of the niche – which has to do with quality and met needs.
I consider BMW a niche player. Certainly they are smaller than Volkswagen, Toyota, or General Motors. Yet they are likely to be around for a while. Apple was once considered a niche player as well (and arguably still is). Yet I don’t see them going away soon.
Being smaller has advantages. You often are more flexible, more nimble, and more innovative. Microsoft lost much of that, and with it, began losing market share. General Motors is another example where being the biggest and most successful was its downfall. The market leader always is displaced in time. Being an underdog that is scrappy, flexible, adaptable, and innovative is what keeps many companies and organizations around.
I’d love to see Txp have a bit more game with the big dogs like Drupul, Joomla, and WordPress. But it would be wrong to focus on them. In a year or two it will be other projects – Concrete or ModX CMS, etc. In my opinion, the key is to innovate with what Txp does best, and shoot for healthy sustainability rather than market clout. The clout may come, but it’s better to handle it as a by-product than have it as a goal.
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Re: A Drupal User: Wake up community - Wordpress.org should scare you!
maverick wrote:
Sustainability requires loyalty, but it also requires a certain level of energy and momentum. It requires a high level of retained user base combined with an user inflow that is greater than replacement requirements.
Very well put.
I’d love to see Txp have a bit more game with the big dogs like Drupul, Joomla, and WordPress. But it would be wrong to focus on them.
You’re right, we shouldn’t focus on them, we should focus on WordPress.
We Love TXP . TXP Themes . TXP Tags . TXP Planet . TXP Make
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Re: A Drupal User: Wake up community - Wordpress.org should scare you!
or… we should stop trying to compete and/or compare, become more innovative and stop worrying about what other cms’ are doing.
I think that by comparing and competing all the time we are governed by them. Is this what we want?
Yiannis
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#8 2011-03-29 15:20:23
- masa
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Re: A Drupal User: Wake up community - Wordpress.org should scare you!
I totally agree with Yiannis.
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Re: A Drupal User: Wake up community - Wordpress.org should scare you!
colak wrote:
become more innovative
The biggest part of the point I was trying to make, said much more simply :)
I think that by comparing and competing all the time we are governed by them.
Excellent point. It’s sort of like Lee Iacocca ‘s “Lead, follow, or get out of the way”. If we compare and compete, it means we are following.
Likewise with our customer’s – it’s appropriate to respond to their felt needs, but the most effective strategy is to innovate by identifying and delivering the needs and wants that people don’t realize they have until you deliver it. Then, once they see it, they slap their forehead and say “of course – that’s it!”.
Last edited by maverick (2011-03-29 15:31:14)
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Re: A Drupal User: Wake up community - Wordpress.org should scare you!
hcgtv wrote:
You’re right, we shouldn’t focus on them, we should focus on WordPress.
Can we learn anything from them? Sure. They’ve done some things right. They’ve done some things wrong.
I wouldn’t focus on them though. Not one thing they do right or wrong determines the value of Textpattern. We as a community, and our development team are responsible for that.
I think there’s a bigger picture than WordPress. They just are the dominant force at the moment. They displaced Moveable Type. One day someone will displace them. It will be whoever focuses on coming needs and new paradigms. The someone who finds a simple and effective way to meet that need and makes it readily available will mold future mindshare.
To me, it’s not about winning the competition for market share. It’s about being a great software that continues to grow and thrive. If market share comes with that. Great. :)
Last edited by maverick (2011-03-29 15:40:07)
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Re: A Drupal User: Wake up community - Wordpress.org should scare you!
It could be that most new users will select their software through something like Softaculous. They will try some demos out and will select what seems the best fit for them. My first impressions from the demos is that txp doesn’t do too bad but there are others which are more appealing. Trying to put myself in the shoes of a new user, from this first impression I would have probably tried the admin side demo of Wordpress, b2Evolution and Pixie because they seemed the best combination of nice looking and simple. I would probably have chosen the software from one of those 3.
Notice also that this is blog software and TXP is not included under CMS (but neither is Wordpress:) so someone at Softaculous obviously sees TXP as more suitable for blogs.
I think TXP is more innovative and user friendly than most software (adi_mobile imho has put TXP ahead of all others regarding responsive design capabilities, for example) but the PR or marketing side of it doesn’t match. Textpattern.com redesign was a big step forward but many people are still not even aware of TXP’s existence or capabilities or they would be using it.
However, the forum does seem as active and friendly as it has ever been, 4.4.0 upgrade went without hitches, TXP 5 sounds like it will be awesome (again!) and so all TXP users are happy bunnies, so perhaps there’s nothing broken that needs fixing. Keep up the good work Devs and plugin authors. You’re doing brilliant!
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Re: A Drupal User: Wake up community - Wordpress.org should scare you!
Can we learn anything from them? Sure. They’ve done some things right. They’ve done some things wrong.
I wouldn’t focus on them though. Not one thing they do right or wrong determines the value of Textpattern. We as a community, and our development team are responsible for that.
I agree with those sentiments. I would add that, from my POV, Textpattern has already arrived at where I need it to be. As far as growth goes, here are my CMS red flags:
- Enterprise-class extensibility
- CMS is also a “framework”
- Agencies that are certified or consider themselves “partners” with the software developers
- People constantly blabbing about it at conferences and in trade publications
- Gigantic user community
Those aren’t all bad things, but working as part of a small team, they each raise the odds of things like maintenance nightmares, support nightmares, and my having to adapt my business to fit their roadmap.
If Textpattern needs to compete with Wordpress and Drupal and Joomla, then good luck and be sure to write back and tell us how it goes. But I look at the software and wonder why the only direction has to be “up” and why people think that new feature development is going to solve that. From what I can tell, new feature development is scratching several personal itches and maybe some higher-profile itches from the community. But new feature development by scratching everybody’s itches has never felt like a reliable way for open source communities to propel the software forward.
If Textpattern 5 really is focused on achieving a sort of competitive software parity, IMO the chances of it sucking really bad increase dramatically.
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