New subject: Marketing to OG Admins

2 Dec 2005

On Fri, Dec 02, 2005 at 05:28:46AM -0500, IvorW wrote:
...

  -----Original Message-----
 From: openguides-dev-bounces(a)openguides.org
 [mailto:openguides-dev-bounces@openguides.org]On Behalf Of Rev Simon
 Rumble
 Sent: 02 December 2005 10:01
 To: openguides-dev(a)openguides.org
 Subject: Re: [OGDev] Marketing to OG Admins

 On 1/12/2005, "(Christopher Schmidt)" &lt;crschmidt(a)crschmidt.net&gt; wrote:

    If there is a way to make it such that OG can
be   installed by anyone
    with FTP and MySQL access  
 Surely if you want to make it as easy as possible, SQLite would be a
 better option?  
 Sorry, SQLite won't scale. Concurrent access and locking is something that SQLite
doesn't do, though it does have transactions and rollback. 
In addition to that, MySQL is a relatively minimal requirement these
days, since most packages are PHP/MySQL hosting packages.

What it comes down to for me is that I see OpenGuides suffering because
its written in Perl. I see PHP packages - I'm thinking specifically
here of Drupal - specifically targeting those users who don't have root
accounts, or even the knowledge to run a shell. But they can edit a
config file, and they can use FTP. Drupal has more than 60,000
installations - OpenGuides has fewer than 100, at least as far as
popular/findable ones go.

If there was a way to package OG such that we could give a simple list
of requirements to their host, have them get it installed, and then FTP
upload a single set of files - even if its relatively large - then I
think that we would see increased adoption.

Perl is scary. It has a bad reputation. People don't want to muck with
installing it, most people don't even want to muck with running CPAN.
Huge numbers of people don't have the ability to install Debian packages
- either because they aren't running Debian, or because they don't have
root - and excluding these people as guide admins simply because they
don't want to learn Perl is probably not the best idea if you want
widespread adoption - and I think OpenGuides taking over the world would
be a very good thing indeed.

Maybe I'm overstating the importance that installation has on adoption,
but I think that some things speak for themselves. Drupal has a very
high adoption rate, and is very easy to install. PHP packages in general
get higher adoption rates, and are easier to install. It is my opinion
that the easier something is to install, the more likely someone will
install it.

OpenGuides does not make things easy to install. I couldn't install it
without help, and I'm a relatively competent user who is familiar with
CPAN. I can't imagine how anyone could expect that "normal" users could
get an OG setup without significant help - and when something doesn't
work, people don't usually ask for help, they give up.

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Open Guide to Boston
http://boston.openguides.org/