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Re: Marketing TXP
zero wrote:
Here you have someone trying to help and you are ignoring him and not replying to emails. It has happened many times before and I have always been prepared to make allowances but there is only so much rejection a person can take.
Hey, welcome to Textpattern ;)
At present, there are only two people working on Textpattern. That’s two persons working on a part time basis to code, debug, answer support questions and maintain web sites. I could elaborate and go on, but suffice it to say that whenever anyone crosses over to official status they forget what it was like to be on the outside looking in.
Peter, I admire your enthusiasm, don’t let it get crushed, redirect it.
We Love TXP . TXP Themes . TXP Tags . TXP Planet . TXP Make
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Re: Marketing TXP
Keith, thanks for the support.
Jukka, thanks for the insight into the coder’s psyche! It explains a lot. It also explains why I am not a coder – not because of money or fame or stuff like that (I am just as idealistic and all for freedom, community, cooperation etc) – but because my mind doesn’t work like that. I tend to move from one thing to another. I can enjoy one thing perhaps for several days or even weeks but then I have to move on. It’s probably why I am not an artist either – they seem to do it day after day all their life.
I had completely overlooked that kind of motivation. Whether it is the whole reason for the lack of communication, though, I don’t know. The thing about my marketing idea (I use the word ‘marketing’ in the most non-financial sense, as Kevin Potts used it in the txpq interview) is that it would only need minimal input from the devs, for example to get it started. Once it is up and running, designers would take over.
Perhaps coders don’t want fame but would they still code for txp if hardly anybody was using it? Surely they want somebody to appreciate their efforts? But perhaps not, I’m not a coder and don’t have a coder-type mentality. More insight into the coder’s psyche would be most welcome!
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Re: Marketing TXP
Peter, I’m not ignoring you. It’s difficult to respond to your suggestions, because I have little or no affinity with marketing and promotion. From a visitor point of view, I think having even more “official” TXP websites is not the way to go. Less is more.
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Re: Marketing TXP
ruud wrote:
From a visitor point of view, I think having even more “official” TXP websites is not the way to go. Less is more.
I agree with this statement. The way the various TXP sites are setup now its quite confusing. Those of us who know their way around might forget this. And the forum remains (and will remain) the main centre for communication regarding TXP.
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Re: Marketing TXP
And do we have any updates on plans for the new TXP branding/homepage look?
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Re: Marketing TXP
jstubbs wrote:
And do we have any updates on plans for the new TXP branding/homepage look?
No, we haven’t. Currently, Kevin Potts is working on a content/IA concept, visual design with an tentative new TXP branding/homepage look will result from his work.
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Re: Marketing TXP
zero wrote:
As for my improved idea I am still surprised that nobody has commented, especially the devs.
As far as I am concerned, may I add to the world’s knowledge that there’s a part of Austria where web access is scarce (by design). I’ve been there during the past days.
On topic: As I replied earlier via e-mail, I don’t expect yet another domain to reduce a prospect user’s learning curve:
More visibility, more entries in the ubiquitous comparison sites equals bigger mind share. But may I doubt that the birth of two new domains
would fuel such an effect?
My opinion: As one might already have noticed, I have a slight tendency to prefer concentrated efforts on already established outlets over adding more “semi-official” resources to the dilution. I’d rather eliminate whatever obstacles textpattern.net constitutes for your aim for anything resembling “documentation”, and use txpq.com for the more “informal” content. As for the “Official Sign of Approval” (if such a thing is needed), txpq.com is linked from textpattern.com. And if this is an endorsement good enough for Google, it should be good enough for the rest of the web, too.
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Re: Marketing TXP
I hope you enjoyed yourself there, Robert. Did you see any football fans? :)
The email you sent was in reply to my previous idea and in it you also said:
So, from my point of view its a very clear “It depends” ;-)
My improved idea puts most of the emphasis on a designer’s blog to present a more design oriented face to the world than the present techie oriented one. But it is also a place to catch traffic looking for ‘blog’. The way I see it is that this traffic can download simple documentation to get them started quickly. If they explore the site though they will soon see Textpattern has much more to offer. So this would not ‘split’ textpattern like my previous idea but reinforce its flexibility and freedom.
It’s good to improve the established sites, they need it, but doing so does virtually nothing, imho, to make Textpattern more visible. The exact same problem is there – txp is not listed on many cms sites nor on many blog sites because it is seen as falling somewhere in the middle.
I don’t want textpatternblog.com to be semi-official, I want it to be official. Not for the sake of google but so designers will feel a stronger sense of belonging and be much more inclined to participate. TXPQ is an example of an unofficial site and how much the community joins in when invited to “suggest or write articles for your community project”. They don’t. It’s great the interviewees have been so helpful and I am thankful and privileged to be a part of that. But I think that if designers were asked to write articles and given their own section to design as they wish, they wouldn’t. Unless they felt it was directly for Textpattern.
And for Jonathan’s The way the various TXP sites are setup now its quite confusing and Ruud’s Less is more I say the answer here is to give them all the same Textpattern look and make linking more obvious. textpatternblog.com would fit nicely into such an association. The idea that there should just be one official site which somehow includes everything would give you devs more work maintaining it, but an official association could leave you more time for developing and give the associates a stronger feeling of belonging.
Have your doubts changed at all now?
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Re: Marketing TXP
Peter,
I am not sure of the merits of a blog versus a cms platform, but I do agree with your comment that there should be a similar look and feel across all TXP sites. textpattern.com is the main site, and personally, I think plugins should be an offshoot of the same site i.e plugins.textpattern.com.
Your suggestion has merit when it comes to bloggers, who might appreciate a different version of the pages/forms that are included out of the box.
That could be interesting – the same basic platform, but with two different setups for pages and forms to make it very simple for blog users.
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Re: Marketing TXP
It must be the way I’ve written it, but everyone keeps seeing blog versus cms. I don’t see it that way at all. The idea is to supplement the cms and catch all those people who are looking for blogware and don’t realise that the textpattern cms will do the job for them. That’s one part of textpatternblog.com. The other part is that it is a blog about textpattern by designers for designers.
And I wasn’t suggesting anything different out of the box other than documentation, although others have suggested it. I like the idea but it would give the devs more work. However, blog documentation could include extra ‘blog enhanced’ templates for pages, forms and styles.
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Re: Marketing TXP
zero wrote:
The idea that there should just be one official site which somehow includes everything would give you devs more work maintaining it, but an official association could leave you more time for developing and give the associates a stronger feeling of belonging.
Have your doubts changed at all now?
I’d like to hear your stance on two things we have to consider:
- There’s no reason why a part of textpattern.com won’t host contributions maintained by someone else, along the lines of the featured sites section which (in theory) would not be maintained by the developers.
- Inviting designers to add their voice to whatever place seems finally fit for that purpose will not work by sending out unsolicited e-mails. This is considered spam under the jurisdiction both Ruud and I live in, and Austrian legal authorities collect anything between 200 and 35,000 EUR on such occasions. Besides that, it requires a very distinguished approach to avoid embarrassing those who are not invited.
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