Mailing List Archive: Catalyst: Dev

Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft

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johncwang at gmail

Oct 17, 2006, 1:23 PM

Post #1 of 44 (4615 views)
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Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft

The Catalyst project has created a marketing team in addition to the dev and
doc teams. Currently jshirley and I are in marketing and anyone else who is
interested is welcome to join. Marketing serves to promote the product
(including docs) so it's important everyone is on the same page. My
intention is for marketing tasks to be defined the Marketing Plan and agreed
upon with the dev and doc teams. Once there is agreement, marketing can
start executing against the plan.

I've put together a plan in a MS Word doc that I've attached and paraphrased
below. Basically we need to come to agreement on some high level decisions
before any action can be taken. For now, I'm using MS Word because I like
and am used to their outline numbering system. I can make it available in
PDF if preferred. I paraphrased the content in this email this time around
and will probably continue to do so for things that need decisions but the
intention is for the full plan to live in that document.

The tasks include defining the target audience and the product.

1) Which of the following groups should be the target audience:
1.1) All web application developers including non-OO PHP and Rails
1.2) MVC/OO framework developers
1.3) All Perl devs
1.4) Perl devs with a clue

We need agreement on this because it has been debated as to what types of
users Catalyst wants to attract, if any. People will have their individual
opinions but we need Catalyst dev+doc+mktg to come to an agreement and for
all three groups to accept that target audience as a driver in goal setting.

I think Catalyst needs to target all web app developers but this means docs
geared towards non-Perl users as well as making it easier for people to
install without CPAN, etc. Because of this marketing cannot make this
decision alone.

How should we, as a group, decide on this?

2) What is the elevator pitch for Catalyst

An "elevator pitch" is the short sales message you can tell soemone in an
elevator ride to get them interested in your product. This will depend on
who we decide is the target audience. I think it should be something along
the lines of:

"The most scalable and flexible web framework backed by the largest open
source library"

This is geared towards non-Perl users as well as management types. We have
the users and the technology to back it up.

3) What is the Catalyst Solution Bundle

People are interested in the entire solution not just the framework so while
Cat is very flexible and has lots of options from a marketing perspective we
need to start pushing one recommended solution. From a marketing perspective
on the website, all these components will be marketed as part of the
Catalyst solution while mentioning components can be swapped out.

In the past, this was Task::Catalyst. The issues:

3.1) Can we get control of Task::Catalyst
3.2) Are these still the right components
3.3) There should be a recommended cache compoent

The solution bundle will need to be supported by doc and dev to make the
bundle as seamless and productive as possible.

4) Does the Catalyst solution need anything else to support the message

If we are going to pitch Catalyst as a great solution, the product needs to
match the expectations generated:

4.1) If we decide to target non-Perl users, can we make the Catalyst
solution super easy to install for someone who doesn't know how to use CPAN?
Should have Cat easily installed into a MyApp/vendor directory?
4.2) Built-in caching that you can just turn on seems to be a selling
feature for other frameworks. While Cat has plugins, should we have a
recommended plugin and the ability to just turn it on and have the Cat app
save cached content to a MyApp/tmp/cache directory?
4.3) Documentation on writing tests for Cat apps. One of the big features
of frameworks is that they make you use better coding practices including
writing tests. I think we need some recommendations and documentation on how
to write common tests for Cat apps using Test::Class, Test::MockObject and
the like. Right now we have the source for existing tests and POD for
Test::WWW::(Mechanize|Selenium)::Catalyst. Should have have tutorials on
using these?

Is there anything else?

The information in this email is a parapharsing of a MS Word doc I put
together and am attaching. It's also available at:

http://www.dev411.com/catalyst/CatalystMarketingPlan_draft.doc

Let me know what you think of the above and how we should come to concensus.

--
John Wang
http://www.dev411.com/blog/

Attachments:

CatalystMarketingPlan_draft.doc (38.5 KB)

jshirley at gmail

Oct 17, 2006, 2:54 PM

Post #2 of 44 (4488 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

On 10/17/06, John Wang <johncwang [at] gmail> wrote:
> The Catalyst project has created a marketing team in addition to the dev and
> doc teams. Currently jshirley and I are in marketing and anyone else who is
> interested is welcome to join. Marketing serves to promote the product
> (including docs) so it's important everyone is on the same page. My
> intention is for marketing tasks to be defined the Marketing Plan and agreed
> upon with the dev and doc teams. Once there is agreement, marketing can
> start executing against the plan.

Hi all. This is my first post on catalyst-dev@ but you guys probably
know me from irc.

> The tasks include defining the target audience and the product.
>
> 1) Which of the following groups should be the target audience:
> 1.1) All web application developers including non-OO PHP and Rails
> 1.2 ) MVC/OO framework developers
> 1.3) All Perl devs
> 1.4) Perl devs with a clue

Here's my big opinionated spiel about this. Just my thoughts as I
dump them out.

As I see it, there are two major groups. There are the antiquated
Perl developers whom are stuck in sort of a spaghetti-monster code
base. They can't migrate from Perl, and are hearing the marketing
speak about all the new hotness that is out in the development world
(whether it be J2EE, Rails or whatever). These guys are easy
converts. They may not have a clue, but they very well may have a
clue and are a victim of circumstance. Very little marketing would be
required to get them to give Catalyst a good shot. To market to this
group, guides for refactoring code to fit into MVC constructs would be
excellent marketing.

The second group are those who are probably more critical of Perl,
thinking of the language as duct tape and nothing that is
fundamentally fit for building large critical applications that must
scale well and have significant benefits over other frameworks. This
should, in my opinion, be the focus of marketing efforts. So, to
somewhat point to the list above, I'm thinking a break down of
marketing content that would be along these lines:
- 50% of the material should be geared towards the non-developer
developers. The types of people who need books and examples to code
something. Designers with a technical mind, etc. I think this
matches with item "1.1) All web application developers including
non-OO PHP and Rails"
- 25% for the more afluent developers with a wider breadth and depth
of programming. These are the people who will be swayed by seeing
performance and scaleability, as well as maintenance (for me, the low
cost of maintaining a Catalyst app is the biggest win) and
flexibility. However, the flexibility will be daunting to the first
group. This would be "1.2) MVC/OO framework developers"
- The last 25% would be served for examples just to get things
bootstrapped and going. Annotated POD with a comment list (like
PHP.net's functions). Screencasts. This would serve all groups
involved equally.

> I think Catalyst needs to target all web app developers but this means docs
> geared towards non-Perl users as well as making it easier for people to
> install without CPAN, etc. Because of this marketing cannot make this
> decision alone.

Agreed -- but what about all web app developers who turn into better
developers from using Catalyst? If all of our material is designed
for the monolithic PHP coder, the glass ceiling is pretty low.

> How should we, as a group, decide on this?

Death match with sporks.

> 2) What is the elevator pitch for Catalyst
>
> An "elevator pitch" is the short sales message you can tell soemone in an
> elevator ride to get them interested in your product. This will depend on
> who we decide is the target audience. I think it should be something along
> the lines of:
>
> "The most scalable and flexible web framework backed by the largest open
> source library"

Scalable at this point is not and cannot be backed up with current
available facts. What's the largest Catalyst app out there? How many
nodes does it run on? Vox? Googling for "vox+catalyst" doesn't have
any decent results. Rails can point to any 37signals app and several
others.

It certainly is flexible, but I'm certain some developers in decision
making positions aren't swayed by hearing that. The maintainability
of a Catalyst app, as well as built-in testability (also thanks to
jrockway for the Selenium bindings) and documentation systems with
test are bigger points. Hardware is cheaper than developer+QA time.

> People are interested in the entire solution not just the framework so while
> Cat is very flexible and has lots of options from a marketing perspective we
> need to start pushing one recommended solution. From a marketing perspective
> on the website, all these components will be marketed as part of the
> Catalyst solution while mentioning components can be swapped out.

I know a lot of you (Hi Matt) hate the term "Best Practices" but that
is what this is. Catalyst needs a list of Best Practices.
Task::Catalyst should support this, and be the simple solution to
getting what you need installed quickly. If not the name
Task::Catalyst, some other bundle package.

> 4.1) If we decide to target non-Perl users, can we make the Catalyst
> solution super easy to install for someone who doesn't know how to use CPAN?
> Should have Cat easily installed into a MyApp/vendor directory?

I had a Perl coder who doesn't do anything with CPAN (see
spaghetti-monster bit above) attempt to install Catalyst and gave up.
I think this is definitely a desired feature.

> 4.3) Documentation on writing tests for Cat apps. One of the big features
> of frameworks is that they make you use better coding practices including
> writing tests. I think we need some recommendations and documentation on how
> to write common tests for Cat apps using Test::Class, Test::MockObject and
> the like. Right now we have the source for existing tests and POD for
> Test::WWW::(Mechanize|Selenium)::Catalyst. Should have have
> tutorials on using these?

I think we definitely should. I know many many many developers who
simply do not understand how to properly write test scripts for web
applications.

> Is there anything else?

It is a good outline, great work. It covers the points I was thinking
of, and many more. Above are the inline points and I'll go through
later. It'd be good to get a wiki setup (MojoMojo, baby!) to start
updating the doc. For now maybe we can just use a trac node (I don't
have access to Trac edits, btw)

Thanks,
-J.

--
J. Shirley :: jshirley [at] gmail :: Killing two stones with one bird...
http://www.toeat.com - http://code.toeat.com/~jshirley

_______________________________________________
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zzbbyy at gmail

Oct 18, 2006, 1:10 AM

Post #3 of 44 (4472 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

Hi all,

That is a great news!

Answering your question if there is something else I see one such
thing. I'll start with a story and then proceed with a more analytic
view.

Let's assume you are a programmer, you have your idea for your great
application and you want to code a working prototype that you could
show to a non-developer. With Rails you can code it by yourself and
not be ashamed by it's ugliness when you finish. With Catalyst you
would have to hire some designer.

There is the economic term of complementary product - a complementary
product to programmers work is a nice design. The theory says that
the value of a product is higher when the price of the complement is
low - so if we want us programmers to be paid well we need to have the
design for cheap - and what is cheaper than having it for free with
the library that you use?

Thus what I would like to add to the marketing plan would be procuring
some nice templates that would be bundled with Catalyst for easy use
by the programmer.

--
Zbyszek

On 10/17/06, John Wang <johncwang [at] gmail> wrote:
> The Catalyst project has created a marketing team in addition to the dev and
> doc teams. Currently jshirley and I are in marketing and anyone else who is
> interested is welcome to join. Marketing serves to promote the product
> (including docs) so it's important everyone is on the same page. My
> intention is for marketing tasks to be defined the Marketing Plan and agreed
> upon with the dev and doc teams. Once there is agreement, marketing can
> start executing against the plan.
>
> I've put together a plan in a MS Word doc that I've attached and paraphrased
> below. Basically we need to come to agreement on some high level decisions
> before any action can be taken. For now, I'm using MS Word because I like
> and am used to their outline numbering system. I can make it available in
> PDF if preferred. I paraphrased the content in this email this time around
> and will probably continue to do so for things that need decisions but the
> intention is for the full plan to live in that document.
>
> The tasks include defining the target audience and the product.
>
> 1) Which of the following groups should be the target audience:
> 1.1) All web application developers including non-OO PHP and Rails
> 1.2 ) MVC/OO framework developers
> 1.3) All Perl devs
> 1.4) Perl devs with a clue
>
> We need agreement on this because it has been debated as to what types of
> users Catalyst wants to attract, if any. People will have their individual
> opinions but we need Catalyst dev+doc+mktg to come to an agreement and for
> all three groups to accept that target audience as a driver in goal setting.
>
> I think Catalyst needs to target all web app developers but this means docs
> geared towards non-Perl users as well as making it easier for people to
> install without CPAN, etc. Because of this marketing cannot make this
> decision alone.
>
> How should we, as a group, decide on this?
>
> 2) What is the elevator pitch for Catalyst
>
> An "elevator pitch" is the short sales message you can tell soemone in an
> elevator ride to get them interested in your product. This will depend on
> who we decide is the target audience. I think it should be something along
> the lines of:
>
> "The most scalable and flexible web framework backed by the largest open
> source library"
>
> This is geared towards non-Perl users as well as management types. We have
> the users and the technology to back it up.
>
> 3) What is the Catalyst Solution Bundle
>
> People are interested in the entire solution not just the framework so while
> Cat is very flexible and has lots of options from a marketing perspective we
> need to start pushing one recommended solution. From a marketing perspective
> on the website, all these components will be marketed as part of the
> Catalyst solution while mentioning components can be swapped out.
>
> In the past, this was Task::Catalyst. The issues:
>
> 3.1) Can we get control of Task::Catalyst
> 3.2) Are these still the right components
> 3.3) There should be a recommended cache compoent
>
> The solution bundle will need to be supported by doc and dev to make the
> bundle as seamless and productive as possible.
>
> 4) Does the Catalyst solution need anything else to support the message
>
> If we are going to pitch Catalyst as a great solution, the product needs to
> match the expectations generated:
>
> 4.1) If we decide to target non-Perl users, can we make the Catalyst
> solution super easy to install for someone who doesn't know how to use CPAN?
> Should have Cat easily installed into a MyApp/vendor directory?
> 4.2) Built-in caching that you can just turn on seems to be a selling
> feature for other frameworks. While Cat has plugins, should we have a
> recommended plugin and the ability to just turn it on and have the Cat app
> save cached content to a MyApp/tmp/cache directory?
> 4.3) Documentation on writing tests for Cat apps. One of the big features
> of frameworks is that they make you use better coding practices including
> writing tests. I think we need some recommendations and documentation on how
> to write common tests for Cat apps using Test::Class, Test::MockObject and
> the like. Right now we have the source for existing tests and POD for
> Test::WWW::(Mechanize|Selenium)::Catalyst. Should have have
> tutorials on using these?
>
> Is there anything else?
>
> The information in this email is a parapharsing of a MS Word doc I put
> together and am attaching. It's also available at:
>
> http://www.dev411.com/catalyst/CatalystMarketingPlan_draft.doc
>
> Let me know what you think of the above and how we should come to concensus.
>
> --
> John Wang
> http://www.dev411.com/blog/
> _______________________________________________
> Catalyst-dev mailing list
> Catalyst-dev [at] lists
> http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev
>
>
>
>

--
Zbigniew Lukasiak
http://brudnopis.blogspot.com/

_______________________________________________
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johncwang at gmail

Oct 18, 2006, 11:37 AM

Post #4 of 44 (4482 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

On 10/18/06, Zbigniew Lukasiak <zzbbyy [at] gmail> wrote:
>
> Thus what I would like to add to the marketing plan would be procuring
> some nice templates that would be bundled with Catalyst for easy use
> by the programmer.

I think including templates only makes sense if it's tied to some X/HTML and
CSS that is generated by Catalyst. Today Catalyst doesn't generate X/HTML or
CSS outside of the HTML::Widget and FormBuilder plugins.

We still need to decide on Catalyst Solution and what form builder it will
include but to be really useful I think there would need to be some standard
X/HTML and CSS output for headers, footers, sidebar widgets and other items
as well. Catalyst isn't designed to conventionalize all of that but Reaction
is. Perhaps it would make more sense to work on a set of templates that gets
bundled with Reaction?

That being said, I haven't looked into how Rails does this. Does Rails
generate some standard CSS that is used by the templates?

--
John Wang
http://www.dev411.com/blog/

jon at jrock

Oct 18, 2006, 1:10 PM

Post #5 of 44 (4486 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

> Thus what I would like to add to the marketing plan would be procuring
> some nice templates that would be bundled with Catalyst for easy use
> by the programmer.

I agree here. Before we can let marketing have at this, though, we need
to get the code infrastructure in place. I think TTSite is the right
direction, but there are some problems with it, and I think we need a
TTSite++ or something like that.

Goals for that:

* Move config from root/lib/config to the myapp.* config file
* Add framework for templates:
- main page (no more header/footer, just a wrapper)
- reusable widgets (nav header/footer / sidebar, etc.)
* make it easy to change themes, if possible
- have a base ttsite.css and then an overridable site.css, if possible
* things that I'm forgetting right now
* I'm not a big fan of the src/ lib/ static/ layout, maube do something
else?

After that, we can turn it over to the web designers to make things
pretty. That's not something I'm qualified to do ;)

Other things:

* ::Helper that will have an "add page" command, that will create the
.tt file, and add an action in the relevant controller (PPI)

Comments / code welcome.

--
package JAPH;use Catalyst qw/-Debug/;($;=JAPH)->config(name => do {
$,.=reverse qw[Jonathan tsu rehton lre rekca Rockway][$_].[split //,
";$;"]->[$_].q; ;for 1..4;$,=~s;^.;;;$,});$;->setup;

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paulm at paulm

Oct 18, 2006, 1:41 PM

Post #6 of 44 (4489 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

perrin at elem

Oct 18, 2006, 2:24 PM

Post #7 of 44 (4477 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

On Wed, 2006-10-18 at 21:41 +0100, Paul Makepeace wrote:
> The single biggest obstable you are likely to find in the real world
> is I suspect that there aren't enough perl programmers. There are far,
> far more PHP and Java programmers than Perl

Java, yes. PHP... I doubt it. There might be more PHP programmers than
Perl programmers who only do web sites, but overall Perl is a pretty
popular tool:
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2Cpython%2Cphp%2Cjava%2Cruby

It's easy to lose sight of that in the face of all the PHP blog posts
though.

- Perrin

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jon at jrock

Oct 18, 2006, 2:55 PM

Post #8 of 44 (4466 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=rails%2Ccatalyst

Yes, I know Catalyst is something else :)

Perrin Harkins wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-10-18 at 21:41 +0100, Paul Makepeace wrote:
>> The single biggest obstable you are likely to find in the real world
>> is I suspect that there aren't enough perl programmers. There are far,
>> far more PHP and Java programmers than Perl
>
> Java, yes. PHP... I doubt it. There might be more PHP programmers than
> Perl programmers who only do web sites, but overall Perl is a pretty
> popular tool:
> http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2Cpython%2Cphp%2Cjava%2Cruby
>
> It's easy to lose sight of that in the face of all the PHP blog posts
> though.
>
> - Perrin
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Catalyst-dev mailing list
> Catalyst-dev [at] lists
> http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev

--
package JAPH;use Catalyst qw/-Debug/;($;=JAPH)->config(name => do {
$,.=reverse qw[Jonathan tsu rehton lre rekca Rockway][$_].[split //,
";$;"]->[$_].q; ;for 1..4;$,=~s;^.;;;$,});$;->setup;

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jshirley at gmail

Oct 18, 2006, 3:08 PM

Post #9 of 44 (4475 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

I think that naming plays an important part here. TTSite is a bad
name, plain and simple.

Reaction is a great name, but is a bit more than just providing some
templating for common behaviors.

And, forward thinking on the TTSite++ ideas...
I do think that a helper that sits on top of the controller helpers
would be nice. We could create the option for different page types to
determine wrappers and then allow a chain of widgets to be added.

What do you guys think?

On 10/18/06, Jonathan Rockway <jon [at] jrock> wrote:
>
> > Thus what I would like to add to the marketing plan would be procuring
> > some nice templates that would be bundled with Catalyst for easy use
> > by the programmer.
>
> I agree here. Before we can let marketing have at this, though, we need
> to get the code infrastructure in place. I think TTSite is the right
> direction, but there are some problems with it, and I think we need a
> TTSite++ or something like that.
>
> Goals for that:
>
> * Move config from root/lib/config to the myapp.* config file
> * Add framework for templates:
> - main page (no more header/footer, just a wrapper)
> - reusable widgets (nav header/footer / sidebar, etc.)
> * make it easy to change themes, if possible
> - have a base ttsite.css and then an overridable site.css, if possible
> * things that I'm forgetting right now
> * I'm not a big fan of the src/ lib/ static/ layout, maube do something
> else?
>
> After that, we can turn it over to the web designers to make things
> pretty. That's not something I'm qualified to do ;)
>
> Other things:
>
> * ::Helper that will have an "add page" command, that will create the
> .tt file, and add an action in the relevant controller (PPI)

> Comments / code welcome.

Hey, I'm marketing now -- you code what I promise! ;)

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jon at jrock

Oct 18, 2006, 3:29 PM

Post #10 of 44 (4466 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

J. Shirley wrote:
> I think that naming plays an important part here. TTSite is a bad
> name, plain and simple.

How about "Element", and call the setup script "Chemist". :)

``As a Chemist, you must use Elements with Catalyst to setup a Reaction.
If you get too much CRUD in your Test::More tube, clean it with AJAX,
and then add Selenium.''

Scary.

--
package JAPH;use Catalyst qw/-Debug/;($;=JAPH)->config(name => do {
$,.=reverse qw[Jonathan tsu rehton lre rekca Rockway][$_].[split //,
";$;"]->[$_].q; ;for 1..4;$,=~s;^.;;;$,});$;->setup;

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jshirley at gmail

Oct 18, 2006, 3:36 PM

Post #11 of 44 (4480 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

Actually Elements isn't a bad idea... I'd worry about getting a C&D
from Adobe though.

"Catalyst Elements make design painless"

Definitely has a leg up on "widgets"

On 10/18/06, Jonathan Rockway <jon [at] jrock> wrote:
>
> J. Shirley wrote:
> > I think that naming plays an important part here. TTSite is a bad
> > name, plain and simple.
>
> How about "Element", and call the setup script "Chemist". :)
>
> ``As a Chemist, you must use Elements with Catalyst to setup a Reaction.
> If you get too much CRUD in your Test::More tube, clean it with AJAX,
> and then add Selenium.''
>
> Scary.
>
> --
> package JAPH;use Catalyst qw/-Debug/;($;=JAPH)->config(name => do {
> $,.=reverse qw[Jonathan tsu rehton lre rekca Rockway][$_].[split //,
> ";$;"]->[$_].q; ;for 1..4;$,=~s;^.;;;$,});$;->setup;
>
> _______________________________________________
> Catalyst-dev mailing list
> Catalyst-dev [at] lists
> http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev
>

--
J. Shirley :: jshirley [at] gmail :: Killing two stones with one bird...
http://www.toeat.com - http://code.toeat.com/~jshirley

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jjn1056 at yahoo

Oct 18, 2006, 3:47 PM

Post #12 of 44 (4471 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

If you want to see a nice trend check out:

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby+rails%2Ccatalyst+perl

--- Jonathan Rockway <jon [at] jrock> wrote:

> http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=rails%2Ccatalyst
>
> Yes, I know Catalyst is something else :)
>
> Perrin Harkins wrote:
> > On Wed, 2006-10-18 at 21:41 +0100, Paul Makepeace
> wrote:
> >> The single biggest obstable you are likely to
> find in the real world
> >> is I suspect that there aren't enough perl
> programmers. There are far,
> >> far more PHP and Java programmers than Perl
> >
> > Java, yes. PHP... I doubt it. There might be
> more PHP programmers than
> > Perl programmers who only do web sites, but
> overall Perl is a pretty
> > popular tool:
> >
>
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2Cpython%2Cphp%2Cjava%2Cruby
> >
> > It's easy to lose sight of that in the face of all
> the PHP blog posts
> > though.
> >
> > - Perrin
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Catalyst-dev mailing list
> > Catalyst-dev [at] lists
> >
>
http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev
>
> --
> package JAPH;use Catalyst
> qw/-Debug/;($;=JAPH)->config(name => do {
> $,.=reverse qw[Jonathan tsu rehton lre rekca
> Rockway][$_].[split //,
> ";$;"]->[$_].q; ;for 1..4;$,=~s;^.;;;$,});$;->setup;
>
> _______________________________________________
> Catalyst-dev mailing list
> Catalyst-dev [at] lists
>
http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev
>

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com

_______________________________________________
Catalyst-dev mailing list
Catalyst-dev [at] lists
http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev

alex at taskforce-1

Oct 18, 2006, 10:18 PM

Post #13 of 44 (4467 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

Hi,

I would have to concur with Paul here. I don't know about United States, but
here in Canada, there seems to be a growing trend to hire php programmers for
web projects, at least from my experience. In the past we contracted out to
variety of clients, less then 30% were perl jobs, the rest were explicitly
requested by the client to be LAMP oriented. It's kind of funny for a
language which doesn't even have namespace support.

I think that searching purely on keyword terms such as perl,php,etc... doesn't
give you indication whether the job entails ASIC engineer or web developer
with perl skills, so probably a search with more criteria would be better to
execute.

Our recommendations do not always hold, the hardest part is persuading the
client into using a certain technology, and like Paul indicated this
basically comes down to level of support and developer base. Usually their
managers will say things like "We need a language that everyone in the
company can use and understand quickly", and since there are way more php
programmers favoring their lovely language this completely obliterates your
argument.

Lot of these companies have archaic systems that are completely
un-maintanable, yet they refuse to convert at any price, because they still
believe quick and dirty is the way to go.

Cheers.

On Wednesday 18 October 2006 14:24, Perrin Harkins wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-10-18 at 21:41 +0100, Paul Makepeace wrote:
> > The single biggest obstable you are likely to find in the real world
> > is I suspect that there aren't enough perl programmers. There are far,
> > far more PHP and Java programmers than Perl
>
> Java, yes. PHP... I doubt it. There might be more PHP programmers than
> Perl programmers who only do web sites, but overall Perl is a pretty
> popular tool:
> http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2Cpython%2Cphp%2Cjava%2Cruby
>
> It's easy to lose sight of that in the face of all the PHP blog posts
> though.
>
> - Perrin
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Catalyst-dev mailing list
> Catalyst-dev [at] lists
> http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev

--
Alex Pavlovic - CTO
TF-1 Inc. ( Custom development, consultancy and training )
http://taskforce-1.com

_______________________________________________
Catalyst-dev mailing list
Catalyst-dev [at] lists
http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev

abw at wardley

Oct 19, 2006, 12:50 AM

Post #14 of 44 (4478 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

Jonathan Rockway wrote:
> I agree here. Before we can let marketing have at this, though, we need
> to get the code infrastructure in place. I think TTSite is the right
> direction, but there are some problems with it, and I think we need a
> TTSite++ or something like that.

TTSite was a fairly quick hack to provide a basic example of some of the
things you can do with TT. I wanted to keep it fairly simple, for the first
version at least. I totally agree that it could do with an overhaul if it's
seeing regular use.

I've already got plans to put together a new collection of TT templates,
scripts, CSS files, graphics, etc., along the lines of TTSite. I've already
got most of the code and content from other projects. it's just a question of
figuring out what's needed and pulling it together.

Although I was planning for it to be more generic than just a Catalyst
component (i.e. so you can use it to generate static sites), it makes a lot of
sense to develop it with the specific aim of working with Catalyst.

So consider me volunteered (although not for another month or so).

A

_______________________________________________
Catalyst-dev mailing list
Catalyst-dev [at] lists
http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev

zzbbyy at gmail

Oct 19, 2006, 1:07 AM

Post #15 of 44 (4470 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

I concur the idea of improving TTSite instead of concentrating on some
specific Catalyst second level frameworks. This way we could have
some standard HTML templates that could be used by many second level
frameworks. And while we can count on programming frameworks to
happen naturally here - for nice HTML templates we cannot so we need
to support them somehow centrally.

The fact that the templates could be used outside of Catalyst would be
a nice gesture to the whole Perl community and can cause some
cross-pollination.

--
Zbyszek

On 10/19/06, Andy Wardley <abw [at] wardley> wrote:
> Jonathan Rockway wrote:
> > I agree here. Before we can let marketing have at this, though, we need
> > to get the code infrastructure in place. I think TTSite is the right
> > direction, but there are some problems with it, and I think we need a
> > TTSite++ or something like that.
>
> TTSite was a fairly quick hack to provide a basic example of some of the
> things you can do with TT. I wanted to keep it fairly simple, for the first
> version at least. I totally agree that it could do with an overhaul if it's
> seeing regular use.
>
> I've already got plans to put together a new collection of TT templates,
> scripts, CSS files, graphics, etc., along the lines of TTSite. I've already
> got most of the code and content from other projects. it's just a question of
> figuring out what's needed and pulling it together.
>
> Although I was planning for it to be more generic than just a Catalyst
> component (i.e. so you can use it to generate static sites), it makes a lot of
> sense to develop it with the specific aim of working with Catalyst.
>
> So consider me volunteered (although not for another month or so).
>
> A
>
> _______________________________________________
> Catalyst-dev mailing list
> Catalyst-dev [at] lists
> http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev
>

--
Zbigniew Lukasiak
http://brudnopis.blogspot.com/

_______________________________________________
Catalyst-dev mailing list
Catalyst-dev [at] lists
http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev

johncwang at gmail

Oct 19, 2006, 1:15 AM

Post #16 of 44 (4493 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

On 10/18/06, Paul Makepeace <paulm [at] paulm> wrote:On 10/17/06, John Wang <
johncwang [at] gmail> wrote:
>> The Catalyst project has created a marketing team in addition to the dev
and
>> doc teams. Currently jshirley and I are in marketing and anyone else who
is
>> interested is welcome to join. Marketing serves to promote the product
snip
>
> The single biggest obstable you are likely to find in the real world
> is I suspect that there aren't enough perl programmers. There are far,
> far more PHP and Java programmers than Perl, and thus the scalability
> from an *organisational* point of view is much better. If we can hire,
> we can grow. If we can't hire, we end up increasingly dependent on a
> small group or single person for our livelihood.
>
> If I were in your position I would spend a lot of time and energy
> focussing your efforts on demonstrating a large developer base with a
> variety of available commercial support possibilities.

On 10/18/06, Alex Pavlovic <alex [at] taskforce-1> wrote:
>
> I would have to concur with Paul here. I don't know about United States,
> but
> here in Canada, there seems to be a growing trend to hire php programmers
> for
> web projects, at least from my experience. In the past we contracted out
> to
> variety of clients, less then 30% were perl jobs, the rest were explicitly
> requested by the client to be LAMP oriented.

I agree this is an important issue. More than just Catalyst, Perl needs
better marketing. I think one big problem is that many people have outdated
views of Perl going back to Perl 4 coding styles. Bill Odom mentioned
finding Perl developers is the number one problem organizations tell him at
this past summer's YAPC::NA. I have cc'd Bill Odom and Andy Lester of TPF as
well as JT Smith of Plain Black / WhyPerl.com on this post because they are
also involved with Perl marketing.

My apologies for the some-what stream-of-consciousness nature of the
following response. It will be formalized as part of the Marketing Plan
after responses are gathered and considered.

(1) Partnerships: Promoting Perl in general is part of TPF's charter so
Catalyst Marketing should work with TPF.

(1.1) WhyPerl.com: TPF and Plain Black (http://www.plainblack.com/ the
company behind WebGUI) are sponsoring a website called WhyPerl.com which
will run articles about Perl. I believe the articles will be business
related on explaining why Perl makes business sense. WhyPerl.com should be
launched in November. I'm not sure what the process for article submission
is yet but ideally members of the Catalyst community would write articles
relating to Catalyst and Perl use in general for that site. If you are a
Perl consultant, writing articles would be a good way to improve your
exposure.

(2) Demonstrating a large developer base: This is a two way street, there
needs to be a group to demonstrate the developer base and there needs to be
a willing developer base.

(2.1) What central marketing organizations can do: Perl not only has a lot
of developers but there are a lot of Perl Monger groups and Perl is the only
language with enough dedication to run non-profit YAPC events. We need to
showcase this information. Catalyst has started this with Planet Catalyst (
http://planet.catalystframework.org/ ) with 14 blog subscriptions. That's
less than Planet Perl but more than Planet Perl 6 and Planet Parrot. Planet
Catalyst also uses and promotes the Perl-based Plagger aggregator. There
maybe additional things we can do in this area to support other Perl
projects.

The number one thing I think Perl can do to demonstrate community activity
is to make an events calendar app like the one that drives the http://www.
php.net homepage. The homepage is a list of events with descriptions and a
side bar chock full of events linking to a calendar style page. There are a
lot of events in the Perl community including YAPCs, PM meetings,
Hackathons, etc. however the perl.org and pm.org pages don't give any
indication of that. My proposal is to make a calendar app like that and then
either run it on a new domain or preferably as the perl.org homepage. I made
this proposal back in August:

http://www.dev411.com/blog/2006/08/26/recommendations-for-the-perl-foundation

It would be great if we could find someone to help create this project using
Catalyst in coordination with TPF. I'm not sure but I'm guessing we may be
able to get a TPF grant for this, after all they are sponsoring WhyPerl.com.

(2.2) What developers can do: While the PHP community does not support
non-profit conferences or contribute to their centralized repository (PEAR)
as much, one thing they do well is blog and blog a lot. Perl developers in
general don't seem to blog anywhere near as much as PHP or Rails developers.
The marketing group can only point to things that exist and more blogs about
Perl would be something to point to. If you have a blog and blog about
Catalyst or DBIx::Class, let me know and I'll add you to Planet Catalyst.
One Rails blog I check out is http://www.nubyonrails.com , the Rails related
blog for Geoffrey Grosenbach which is separate from but linked from his
consulting company site http://www.topfunky.com . If you don't have a blog
and want to help Perl, consider starting one. BTW, the reason I started my
own blog back in May was because I didn't think there were enough people
blogging about Catalyst.

The other thing developers can do is Digg and Delicious articles.
Digg/Delicious often. Check out articles that show up on Planet Catalyst and
bookmark anything that seems interesting and others may want to read using
Delicious.

There are other things developers can do like participate in PMs and give
presentations but blogging is the number one thing Perl devs can do to help
Perl. Perl's competition is blogging like there is no tomorrow. Scott Laird,
a core dev for the Typo blog engine even blogs about using SVK. How many
Perl devs blog about SVK? Blogging isn't for everyone but it is one thing
that sets Perl devs apart from PHP and Rails devs (not sure about Java).

(3) Demonstrate Commercial Support Possibilities: We can work on some
central site / directory of vendors that provide commercial support for
Perl. To be successful I think the directory needs to be more than names and
websites. It would be great if consultants marketed themselves (like many
successful consultants do) by articles for WhyPerl.com, blogged, gave
presentations, etc. and then mention their companies in those activities.
For example many articles have an author bio at the bottom of the article
which would be a great place to mention your company. Blog sites can either
be your company site or link to your company site ( e.g. nubyonrails.com <->
topfunky.com).

Catalyst Marketing can help by assisting with idea generation, editing, and
creating portals to point to those resources once they are available.

The best marketing is a combination of centralized marketing working with an
active user community. For example, many marketing-oriented case study
brochures are written by marketing but with data from the users. For more
technical resources, marketing organizations will often create ways to
showcase what their users are doing. One example of this is MySQL's
partnership with Web 2.0 companies. While MySQL has written a couple of
white papers, if you go to their website (
http://www.mysql.com/industry/web/ ) one of the most interesting things is
the case studies written by their users including Flickr, LiveJournal, Mixi,
Technorati, Wikipedia and others. I assembled the presentation list by going
through all their customer pages here:

http://www.dev411.com/blog/2006/10/05/mysql-deployment-presentations

Of that list, LiveJournal and Mixi are running huge sites using Perl.
Ideally those presentations would also be linked from a URI such as
http://www.perl.org/industry/web . I can work with TPF to do this.

Sorry for this long winded response. The jist is that for successful
marketing of Perl to happen in the area of demonstrating Perl developers we
need to following:

(a) More active centralized marketing support: Catalyst Marketing will seek
work with WhyPerl.com and TPF. The goal will be to create vehicles to
highlight what is happening in the community, e.g. planet websites, the
calendar app to highlight Perl community activity, writing and helping get
writers for WhyPerl, a consultant directory.
(b) More active developer community in the area of self-promotion: While
centralized marketing will focus on infrastructure to showcase what the
community is doing, the community needs to provide the content and be active
so as to be seen.

I will collect the responses from this issue and other ones and include them
in the next revision of the Catalyst marketing plan.

--
John Wang
http://www.dev411.com/blog/

johncwang at gmail

Oct 19, 2006, 1:27 AM

Post #17 of 44 (4477 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

On 10/19/06, Zbigniew Lukasiak <zzbbyy [at] gmail> wrote:
>
> I concur the idea of improving TTSite instead of concentrating on some
> specific Catalyst second level frameworks. This way we could have
> some standard HTML templates that could be used by many second level
> frameworks. And while we can count on programming frameworks to
> happen naturally here - for nice HTML templates we cannot so we need
> to support them somehow centrally.

Templates do not have to be an either-or between TTSite and other widget
systems. The great thing about CSS is if the X/HTML is generated in a
standard format with consistent CSS/DOM classes and ids, it will be trivial
to use the templates for multiple purposes. I would propose that a standard
CSS/DOM lexicon be created for headers, footers, body and body parts (e.g.
articles, sidebars, pagination, etc. and have multiple solutions target
that. A standard set of JavaScript can be created as well. This approach is
framework and even language independent. Using a full CSS system makes it
trivial to port templates from one system to another.

One of the best ways to generate templates is to have a theme contest for a
blog engine. The Typo theme contest generated over 100 new themes, all done
with CSS and thus easily ported to other applications, such as Perl-based
blog engines. Once the lexicon is created, it would be ideal to use it in a
generalized blog engine and run a promotion around that. The great thing
about this approach is you can typically get donations for prizes and you
only need to give prizes to say the top 10 while you get 100+ full,
multi-page themes.

--
John Wang
http://www.dev411.com/blog/

johncwang at gmail

Oct 19, 2006, 1:30 AM

Post #18 of 44 (4470 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

On 10/19/06, John Wang <johncwang [at] gmail> wrote:
>
> On 10/19/06, Zbigniew Lukasiak <zzbbyy [at] gmail> wrote:
> >
> > I concur the idea of improving TTSite instead of concentrating on some
> > specific Catalyst second level frameworks. This way we could have
> > some standard HTML templates that could be used by many second level
> > frameworks. And while we can count on programming frameworks to
> > happen naturally here - for nice HTML templates we cannot so we need
> > to support them somehow centrally.
>
>
> Templates do not have to be an either-or between TTSite and other widget
> systems. The great thing about CSS is if the X/HTML is generated in a
> standard format with consistent CSS/DOM classes and ids, it will be trivial
> to use the templates for multiple purposes. I would propose that a standard
> CSS/DOM lexicon be created for headers, footers, body and body parts ( e.g.
> articles, sidebars, pagination, etc. and have multiple solutions target
> that. A standard set of JavaScript can be created as well. This approach is
> framework and even language independent. Using a full CSS system makes it
> trivial to port templates from one system to another.
>
> One of the best ways to generate templates is to have a theme contest for
> a blog engine. The Typo theme contest generated over 100 new themes, all
> done with CSS and thus easily ported to other applications, such as
> Perl-based blog engines. Once the lexicon is created, it would be ideal to
> use it in a generalized blog engine and run a promotion around that. The
> great thing about this approach is you can typically get donations for
> prizes and you only need to give prizes to say the top 10 while you get 100+
> full, multi-page themes.
>

In addition to running a theme contest, with a standardized CSS lexicon, we
can begin porting many existing CSS templates and each template only needs
to be ported once to be used across a wide range of Perl apps and solutions.
We can even work with Plagger on a unified CSS lexicon.

--
John Wang
http://www.dev411.com/blog/

zzbbyy at gmail

Oct 19, 2006, 2:06 AM

Post #19 of 44 (4484 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

Just a thought on the blogging part - we have a very active mailing
list and if we just tweak the archives presentation a bit it we could
make a blog out of it instantly.

--
Zbyszek

On 10/19/06, John Wang <johncwang [at] gmail> wrote:
> On 10/18/06, Paul Makepeace <paulm [at] paulm> wrote:On 10/17/06, John Wang <
> johncwang [at] gmail> wrote:
> >> The Catalyst project has created a marketing team in addition to the dev
> and
> >> doc teams. Currently jshirley and I are in marketing and anyone else who
> is
> >> interested is welcome to join. Marketing serves to promote the product
> snip
> >
> > The single biggest obstable you are likely to find in the real world
> > is I suspect that there aren't enough perl programmers. There are far,
> > far more PHP and Java programmers than Perl, and thus the scalability
> > from an *organisational* point of view is much better. If we can hire,
> > we can grow. If we can't hire, we end up increasingly dependent on a
> > small group or single person for our livelihood.
> >
> > If I were in your position I would spend a lot of time and energy
> > focussing your efforts on demonstrating a large developer base with a
> > variety of available commercial support possibilities.
>
>
> On 10/18/06, Alex Pavlovic <alex [at] taskforce-1 > wrote:
> > I would have to concur with Paul here. I don't know about United States,
> but
> > here in Canada, there seems to be a growing trend to hire php programmers
> for
> > web projects, at least from my experience. In the past we contracted out
> to
> > variety of clients, less then 30% were perl jobs, the rest were explicitly
> > requested by the client to be LAMP oriented.
>
> I agree this is an important issue. More than just Catalyst, Perl needs
> better marketing. I think one big problem is that many people have outdated
> views of Perl going back to Perl 4 coding styles. Bill Odom mentioned
> finding Perl developers is the number one problem organizations tell him at
> this past summer's YAPC::NA. I have cc'd Bill Odom and Andy Lester of TPF as
> well as JT Smith of Plain Black / WhyPerl.com on this post because they are
> also involved with Perl marketing.
>
> My apologies for the some-what stream-of-consciousness nature of the
> following response. It will be formalized as part of the Marketing Plan
> after responses are gathered and considered.
>
> (1) Partnerships: Promoting Perl in general is part of TPF's charter so
> Catalyst Marketing should work with TPF.
>
> (1.1) WhyPerl.com: TPF and Plain Black (http://www.plainblack.com/ the
> company behind WebGUI) are sponsoring a website called WhyPerl.com which
> will run articles about Perl. I believe the articles will be business
> related on explaining why Perl makes business sense. WhyPerl.com should be
> launched in November. I'm not sure what the process for article submission
> is yet but ideally members of the Catalyst community would write articles
> relating to Catalyst and Perl use in general for that site. If you are a
> Perl consultant, writing articles would be a good way to improve your
> exposure.
>
> (2) Demonstrating a large developer base: This is a two way street, there
> needs to be a group to demonstrate the developer base and there needs to be
> a willing developer base.
>
> (2.1) What central marketing organizations can do: Perl not only has a lot
> of developers but there are a lot of Perl Monger groups and Perl is the only
> language with enough dedication to run non-profit YAPC events. We need to
> showcase this information. Catalyst has started this with Planet Catalyst (
> http://planet.catalystframework.org/ ) with 14 blog
> subscriptions. That's less than Planet Perl but more than Planet Perl 6 and
> Planet Parrot. Planet Catalyst also uses and promotes the Perl-based Plagger
> aggregator. There maybe additional things we can do in this area to support
> other Perl projects.
>
> The number one thing I think Perl can do to demonstrate community activity
> is to make an events calendar app like the one that drives the http://www.
> php.net homepage. The homepage is a list of events with descriptions and a
> side bar chock full of events linking to a calendar style page. There are a
> lot of events in the Perl community including YAPCs, PM meetings,
> Hackathons, etc. however the perl.org and pm.org pages don't give any
> indication of that. My proposal is to make a calendar app like that and then
> either run it on a new domain or preferably as the perl.org homepage. I made
> this proposal back in August:
>
> http://www.dev411.com/blog/2006/08/26/recommendations-for-the-perl-foundation
>
> It would be great if we could find someone to help create this project using
> Catalyst in coordination with TPF. I'm not sure but I'm guessing we may be
> able to get a TPF grant for this, after all they are sponsoring WhyPerl.com.
>
> (2.2) What developers can do: While the PHP community does not support
> non-profit conferences or contribute to their centralized repository (PEAR)
> as much, one thing they do well is blog and blog a lot. Perl developers in
> general don't seem to blog anywhere near as much as PHP or Rails developers.
> The marketing group can only point to things that exist and more blogs about
> Perl would be something to point to. If you have a blog and blog about
> Catalyst or DBIx::Class, let me know and I'll add you to Planet Catalyst.
> One Rails blog I check out is http://www.nubyonrails.com , the Rails related
> blog for Geoffrey Grosenbach which is separate from but linked from his
> consulting company site http://www.topfunky.com . If you don't have a blog
> and want to help Perl, consider starting one. BTW, the reason I started my
> own blog back in May was because I didn't think there were enough people
> blogging about Catalyst.
>
> The other thing developers can do is Digg and Delicious articles.
> Digg/Delicious often. Check out articles that show up on Planet Catalyst and
> bookmark anything that seems interesting and others may want to read using
> Delicious.
>
> There are other things developers can do like participate in PMs and give
> presentations but blogging is the number one thing Perl devs can do to help
> Perl. Perl's competition is blogging like there is no tomorrow. Scott Laird,
> a core dev for the Typo blog engine even blogs about using SVK. How many
> Perl devs blog about SVK? Blogging isn't for everyone but it is one thing
> that sets Perl devs apart from PHP and Rails devs (not sure about Java).
>
> (3) Demonstrate Commercial Support Possibilities: We can work on some
> central site / directory of vendors that provide commercial support for
> Perl. To be successful I think the directory needs to be more than names and
> websites. It would be great if consultants marketed themselves (like many
> successful consultants do) by articles for WhyPerl.com, blogged, gave
> presentations, etc. and then mention their companies in those activities.
> For example many articles have an author bio at the bottom of the article
> which would be a great place to mention your company. Blog sites can either
> be your company site or link to your company site ( e.g. nubyonrails.com <->
> topfunky.com).
>
> Catalyst Marketing can help by assisting with idea generation, editing, and
> creating portals to point to those resources once they are available.
>
> The best marketing is a combination of centralized marketing working with an
> active user community. For example, many marketing-oriented case study
> brochures are written by marketing but with data from the users. For more
> technical resources, marketing organizations will often create ways to
> showcase what their users are doing. One example of this is MySQL's
> partnership with Web 2.0 companies. While MySQL has written a couple of
> white papers, if you go to their website (
> http://www.mysql.com/industry/web/ ) one of the most
> interesting things is the case studies written by their users including
> Flickr, LiveJournal, Mixi, Technorati, Wikipedia and others. I assembled the
> presentation list by going through all their customer pages here:
>
> http://www.dev411.com/blog/2006/10/05/mysql-deployment-presentations
>
> Of that list, LiveJournal and Mixi are running huge sites using Perl.
> Ideally those presentations would also be linked from a URI such as
> http://www.perl.org/industry/web . I can work with TPF to
> do this.
>
> Sorry for this long winded response. The jist is that for successful
> marketing of Perl to happen in the area of demonstrating Perl developers we
> need to following:
>
> (a) More active centralized marketing support: Catalyst Marketing will seek
> work with WhyPerl.com and TPF. The goal will be to create vehicles to
> highlight what is happening in the community, e.g. planet websites, the
> calendar app to highlight Perl community activity, writing and helping get
> writers for WhyPerl, a consultant directory.
> (b) More active developer community in the area of self-promotion: While
> centralized marketing will focus on infrastructure to showcase what the
> community is doing, the community needs to provide the content and be active
> so as to be seen.
>
> I will collect the responses from this issue and other ones and include them
> in the next revision of the Catalyst marketing plan.
>
>
> --
> John Wang
> http://www.dev411.com/blog/
> _______________________________________________
> Catalyst-dev mailing list
> Catalyst-dev [at] lists
> http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev
>
>
>

--
Zbigniew Lukasiak
http://brudnopis.blogspot.com/

_______________________________________________
Catalyst-dev mailing list
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http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev

diment at gmail

Oct 19, 2006, 3:36 AM

Post #20 of 44 (4467 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

On 19/10/06, Zbigniew Lukasiak <zzbbyy [at] gmail> wrote:
>
> Just a thought on the blogging part - we have a very active mailing
> list and if we just tweak the archives presentation a bit it we could
> make a blog out of it instantly.
>

Scary.

I guess you're talking about 1 post per thread and comments as replies from
each.

Could probably do with some moderation as well I guess

johncwang at gmail

Oct 19, 2006, 8:45 AM

Post #21 of 44 (4487 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

On 10/19/06, JT Smith <jt [at] plainblack> wrote:
>
> 2) WebGUI will have a calendar with the features your looking for by the
> end of
> November. It already does have one calendar, but it kind of sucks. The new
> one will be
> all ajaxified, have support for ical (both for publishing and viewing),
> and will allow
> for subscriptions so people can sign up to be reminded about their
> favorite events. I
> know you're promoting catalyst, but there's also something to be said for
> not
> reinventing the wheel.

That's excellent. The calendar app would be to support all Perl events so I
don't see a reason to make Catalyst a requirement. Everyone is busy enough
that if a Perl-based solution is available and works, I would tend prefer
that, especially if it's a solution we (the Perl community) can recommend to
others.

--
John Wang
http://www.dev411.com/blog/

johncwang at gmail

Oct 19, 2006, 9:08 AM

Post #22 of 44 (4465 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

On 10/19/06, Zbigniew Lukasiak <zzbbyy [at] gmail> wrote:
>
> Just a thought on the blogging part - we have a very active mailing
> list and if we just tweak the archives presentation a bit it we could
> make a blog out of it instantly.

I've been working on a Catalyst-based mailing list archive viewer app which
is nearing the final stages. Hopefully it will become a good way to view not
just the Catalyst mailing list but other ones as well. I'll be looking for a
few beta testers soon to workout what I'm sure will be numerous bugs before
launch. Let me know if anyone is interested.

--
John Wang
http://www.dev411.com/blog/

jon at jrock

Oct 19, 2006, 9:16 AM

Post #23 of 44 (4466 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

It would be nice if you made the source code available.

John Wang wrote:

> I've been working on a Catalyst-based mailing list archive viewer app
> which is nearing the final stages. Hopefully it will become a good way
> to view not just the Catalyst mailing list but other ones as well. I'll
> be looking for a few beta testers soon to workout what I'm sure will be
> numerous bugs before launch. Let me know if anyone is interested.

--
package JAPH;use Catalyst qw/-Debug/;($;=JAPH)->config(name => do {
$,.=reverse qw[Jonathan tsu rehton lre rekca Rockway][$_].[split //,
";$;"]->[$_].q; ;for 1..4;$,=~s;^.;;;$,});$;->setup;

_______________________________________________
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http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev

johncwang at gmail

Oct 19, 2006, 11:03 AM

Post #24 of 44 (4467 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

On 10/19/06, Jonathan Rockway <jon [at] jrock> wrote:
>
> It would be nice if you made the source code available.
>
> John Wang wrote:
> > I've been working on a Catalyst-based mailing list archive viewer app
> > which is nearing the final stages. Hopefully it will become a good way
> > to view not just the Catalyst mailing list but other ones as well. I'll
> > be looking for a few beta testers soon to workout what I'm sure will be
> > numerous bugs before launch. Let me know if anyone is interested.

The app code is split into two groups, app specific and generic code that
can be used for other apps. I'm considering open sourcing the latter (but
waiting for a Trac replacement). The app itself will not be open sourced due
to a variety of reasons but I plan on discussing the architecture, design
decisions and possibly some code snippets in blog articles and slide
presentations. It uses Catalyst but makes some departures from standard
Catalyst practices. I put together a brief presentation on what I've learned
from building the app so far. Some departures are mentioned in slides 4-8.

http://www.dev411.com/slides/webappdesign.xul

--
John Wang
http://www.dev411.com/blog/

jshirley at gmail

Oct 19, 2006, 11:55 AM

Post #25 of 44 (4466 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

Totally unrelated sidenote: I really dig the XUL-based slideshows and
I think they're becoming increasingly popular (not just regarding
Catalyst).

Any interest in creating a XUL slideshow template that is based off of
some of the new website designs (or the existing design) to solidify
the display?

On 10/19/06, John Wang <johncwang [at] gmail> wrote:
> On 10/19/06, Jonathan Rockway <jon [at] jrock> wrote:
> > It would be nice if you made the source code available.
> >
> > John Wang wrote:
> > > I've been working on a Catalyst-based mailing list archive viewer app
> > > which is nearing the final stages. Hopefully it will become a good way
> > > to view not just the Catalyst mailing list but other ones as well. I'll
> > > be looking for a few beta testers soon to workout what I'm sure will be
> > > numerous bugs before launch. Let me know if anyone is interested.
>
> The app code is split into two groups, app specific and generic code that
> can be used for other apps. I'm considering open sourcing the latter (but
> waiting for a Trac replacement). The app itself will not be open sourced due
> to a variety of reasons but I plan on discussing the architecture, design
> decisions and possibly some code snippets in blog articles and slide
> presentations. It uses Catalyst but makes some departures from standard
> Catalyst practices. I put together a brief presentation on what I've learned
> from building the app so far. Some departures are mentioned in slides 4-8.
>
> http://www.dev411.com/slides/webappdesign.xul
>
> --
> John Wang
> http://www.dev411.com/blog/
> _______________________________________________
> Catalyst-dev mailing list
> Catalyst-dev [at] lists
> http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev
>
>
>

_______________________________________________
Catalyst-dev mailing list
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http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev

johncwang at gmail

Oct 19, 2006, 1:07 PM

Post #26 of 44 (2618 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

On 10/19/06, J. Shirley <jshirley [at] gmail> wrote:
>
> Any interest in creating a XUL slideshow template that is based off of
> some of the new website designs (or the existing design) to solidify
> the display?

I haven't had time to look into theming XUL templates but it would be
interesting to try. Most of the ones I've seen have been pretty basic, e.g.
no background graphics. It would be cool to have one with the cat logo
grayed out in the background. Anyone know how to do that?

--
John Wang
http://www.dev411.com/blog/

jon at jrock

Oct 19, 2006, 1:47 PM

Post #27 of 44 (2611 views)
Permalink

Re: TTSite++ [In reply to]

The only thing that's really holding me back is deciding on a namespace
to put my fixes in. The original TTSite isn't under our control, I
don't think, so suggestions for names would be appreciated (as the
author of "Angerwhale", I'm no longer legally allowed to name software
projects ;)

> Although I was planning for it to be more generic than just a Catalyst
> component (i.e. so you can use it to generate static sites), it makes a lot of
> sense to develop it with the specific aim of working with Catalyst.
>
> So consider me volunteered (although not for another month or so).

Thanks! I have no problems with trying to make things generic... I
think that's always a good idea.

For now, I'm going to work on integrating TTSite with Catalyst a bit
nicer (config file, helpers, etc.), and from there we can start
integrating some more templates and styles.

Regards,
Jonathan Rockway

--
package JAPH;use Catalyst qw/-Debug/;($;=JAPH)->config(name => do {
$,.=reverse qw[Jonathan tsu rehton lre rekca Rockway][$_].[split //,
";$;"]->[$_].q; ;for 1..4;$,=~s;^.;;;$,});$;->setup;

_______________________________________________
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http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev

jshirley at gmail

Oct 19, 2006, 2:25 PM

Post #28 of 44 (2606 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

I'll poke at it, seems fun. Do we have any desired template?

On 10/19/06, John Wang <johncwang [at] gmail> wrote:
> On 10/19/06, J. Shirley <jshirley [at] gmail> wrote:
> > Any interest in creating a XUL slideshow template that is based off of
> > some of the new website designs (or the existing design) to solidify
> > the display?
>
> I haven't had time to look into theming XUL templates but it would be
> interesting to try. Most of the ones I've seen have been pretty basic, e.g.
> no background graphics. It would be cool to have one with the cat logo
> grayed out in the background. Anyone know how to do that?
>
> --
>
> John Wang
> http://www.dev411.com/blog/
> _______________________________________________
> Catalyst-dev mailing list
> Catalyst-dev [at] lists
> http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev
>
>
>

_______________________________________________
Catalyst-dev mailing list
Catalyst-dev [at] lists
http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev

jon at jrock

Oct 19, 2006, 2:43 PM

Post #29 of 44 (2613 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

BTW, in case you haven't looked at HTML Slidy (from the author of HTML
Tidy):

http://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/Slidy/

I like this approach since it's just XHTML + javascript.

J. Shirley wrote:
> I'll poke at it, seems fun. Do we have any desired template?
>
> On 10/19/06, John Wang <johncwang [at] gmail> wrote:
>> On 10/19/06, J. Shirley <jshirley [at] gmail> wrote:
>>> Any interest in creating a XUL slideshow template that is based off of
>>> some of the new website designs (or the existing design) to solidify
>>> the display?
>> I haven't had time to look into theming XUL templates but it would be
>> interesting to try. Most of the ones I've seen have been pretty basic, e.g.
>> no background graphics. It would be cool to have one with the cat logo
>> grayed out in the background. Anyone know how to do that?

--
package JAPH;use Catalyst qw/-Debug/;($;=JAPH)->config(name => do {
$,.=reverse qw[Jonathan tsu rehton lre rekca Rockway][$_].[split //,
";$;"]->[$_].q; ;for 1..4;$,=~s;^.;;;$,});$;->setup;

_______________________________________________
Catalyst-dev mailing list
Catalyst-dev [at] lists
http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev

johncwang at gmail

Oct 19, 2006, 2:56 PM

Post #30 of 44 (2602 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

On 10/19/06, Jonathan Rockway <jon [at] jrock> wrote:
>
> BTW, in case you haven't looked at HTML Slidy (from the author of HTML
> Tidy):
>
> http://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/Slidy/
>
> I like this approach since it's just XHTML + javascript.

How do you go backwards with Slidy? With XUL you just right click to go
backwards.

XUL is just XML + javascript ;)

--
John Wang
http://www.dev411.com/blog/

jshirley at gmail

Oct 19, 2006, 3:34 PM

Post #31 of 44 (2604 views)
Permalink

Re: TTSite++ [In reply to]

My vote is for Elements.

If we want to make the name more tied to TT, how about Elementts?

On 10/19/06, Jonathan Rockway <jon [at] jrock> wrote:
> The only thing that's really holding me back is deciding on a namespace
> to put my fixes in. The original TTSite isn't under our control, I
> don't think, so suggestions for names would be appreciated (as the
> author of "Angerwhale", I'm no longer legally allowed to name software
> projects ;)
>
> > Although I was planning for it to be more generic than just a Catalyst
> > component (i.e. so you can use it to generate static sites), it makes a lot of
> > sense to develop it with the specific aim of working with Catalyst.
> >
> > So consider me volunteered (although not for another month or so).
>
> Thanks! I have no problems with trying to make things generic... I
> think that's always a good idea.
>
> For now, I'm going to work on integrating TTSite with Catalyst a bit
> nicer (config file, helpers, etc.), and from there we can start
> integrating some more templates and styles.
>
> Regards,
> Jonathan Rockway
>
> --
> package JAPH;use Catalyst qw/-Debug/;($;=JAPH)->config(name => do {
> $,.=reverse qw[Jonathan tsu rehton lre rekca Rockway][$_].[split //,
> ";$;"]->[$_].q; ;for 1..4;$,=~s;^.;;;$,});$;->setup;
>
> _______________________________________________
> Catalyst-dev mailing list
> Catalyst-dev [at] lists
> http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev
>

_______________________________________________
Catalyst-dev mailing list
Catalyst-dev [at] lists
http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev

jon at jrock

Oct 19, 2006, 3:35 PM

Post #32 of 44 (2618 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

> XUL is just XML + javascript ;)

Right, but I already have an XHTML user agent. I don't have an XUL
user-agent (currently in memory, anyway) :)

The less complex something is, the better.

--
package JAPH;use Catalyst qw/-Debug/;($;=JAPH)->config(name => do {
$,.=reverse qw[Jonathan tsu rehton lre rekca Rockway][$_].[split //,
";$;"]->[$_].q; ;for 1..4;$,=~s;^.;;;$,});$;->setup;

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zzbbyy at gmail

Oct 19, 2006, 11:06 PM

Post #33 of 44 (2623 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

Hi,

Going back to the marketing document I see one more thing that can be
added there - some introduction why we at all need this marketing.
Based on this we could deduce who should we market to etc.

Top of head reasons that can be added there:
- hosting companies should treat Catalyst as a serious framework and
make life easier for those using it
- more people working on Catalyst add ons
- more users of Catalyst means better testing

There are also disadvantages - more people working with Catalyst means
APIs need to be more static, any change would involve much more
communication between parties etc.

--
Zbyszek

On 10/17/06, John Wang <johncwang [at] gmail> wrote:
> The Catalyst project has created a marketing team in addition to the dev and
> doc teams. Currently jshirley and I are in marketing and anyone else who is
> interested is welcome to join. Marketing serves to promote the product
> (including docs) so it's important everyone is on the same page. My
> intention is for marketing tasks to be defined the Marketing Plan and agreed
> upon with the dev and doc teams. Once there is agreement, marketing can
> start executing against the plan.
>
> I've put together a plan in a MS Word doc that I've attached and paraphrased
> below. Basically we need to come to agreement on some high level decisions
> before any action can be taken. For now, I'm using MS Word because I like
> and am used to their outline numbering system. I can make it available in
> PDF if preferred. I paraphrased the content in this email this time around
> and will probably continue to do so for things that need decisions but the
> intention is for the full plan to live in that document.
>
> The tasks include defining the target audience and the product.
>
> 1) Which of the following groups should be the target audience:
> 1.1) All web application developers including non-OO PHP and Rails
> 1.2 ) MVC/OO framework developers
> 1.3) All Perl devs
> 1.4) Perl devs with a clue
>
> We need agreement on this because it has been debated as to what types of
> users Catalyst wants to attract, if any. People will have their individual
> opinions but we need Catalyst dev+doc+mktg to come to an agreement and for
> all three groups to accept that target audience as a driver in goal setting.
>
> I think Catalyst needs to target all web app developers but this means docs
> geared towards non-Perl users as well as making it easier for people to
> install without CPAN, etc. Because of this marketing cannot make this
> decision alone.
>
> How should we, as a group, decide on this?
>
> 2) What is the elevator pitch for Catalyst
>
> An "elevator pitch" is the short sales message you can tell soemone in an
> elevator ride to get them interested in your product. This will depend on
> who we decide is the target audience. I think it should be something along
> the lines of:
>
> "The most scalable and flexible web framework backed by the largest open
> source library"
>
> This is geared towards non-Perl users as well as management types. We have
> the users and the technology to back it up.
>
> 3) What is the Catalyst Solution Bundle
>
> People are interested in the entire solution not just the framework so while
> Cat is very flexible and has lots of options from a marketing perspective we
> need to start pushing one recommended solution. From a marketing perspective
> on the website, all these components will be marketed as part of the
> Catalyst solution while mentioning components can be swapped out.
>
> In the past, this was Task::Catalyst. The issues:
>
> 3.1) Can we get control of Task::Catalyst
> 3.2) Are these still the right components
> 3.3) There should be a recommended cache compoent
>
> The solution bundle will need to be supported by doc and dev to make the
> bundle as seamless and productive as possible.
>
> 4) Does the Catalyst solution need anything else to support the message
>
> If we are going to pitch Catalyst as a great solution, the product needs to
> match the expectations generated:
>
> 4.1) If we decide to target non-Perl users, can we make the Catalyst
> solution super easy to install for someone who doesn't know how to use CPAN?
> Should have Cat easily installed into a MyApp/vendor directory?
> 4.2) Built-in caching that you can just turn on seems to be a selling
> feature for other frameworks. While Cat has plugins, should we have a
> recommended plugin and the ability to just turn it on and have the Cat app
> save cached content to a MyApp/tmp/cache directory?
> 4.3) Documentation on writing tests for Cat apps. One of the big features
> of frameworks is that they make you use better coding practices including
> writing tests. I think we need some recommendations and documentation on how
> to write common tests for Cat apps using Test::Class, Test::MockObject and
> the like. Right now we have the source for existing tests and POD for
> Test::WWW::(Mechanize|Selenium)::Catalyst. Should have have
> tutorials on using these?
>
> Is there anything else?
>
> The information in this email is a parapharsing of a MS Word doc I put
> together and am attaching. It's also available at:
>
> http://www.dev411.com/catalyst/CatalystMarketingPlan_draft.doc
>
> Let me know what you think of the above and how we should come to concensus.
>
> --
> John Wang
> http://www.dev411.com/blog/
> _______________________________________________
> Catalyst-dev mailing list
> Catalyst-dev [at] lists
> http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev
>
>
>
>

--
Zbigniew Lukasiak
http://brudnopis.blogspot.com/

_______________________________________________
Catalyst-dev mailing list
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http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev

ash at cpan

Oct 20, 2006, 2:46 AM

Post #34 of 44 (2618 views)
Permalink

Re: TTSite++ [In reply to]

My vote would be to avoid "clever" names like Elementts - always a
danger of people thinking its just a typo.

Of course to combat this it could be ElemenTTs but my vote is still for
Elements <-- plain, simple yet conveys something.

Ash

J. Shirley wrote:
> My vote is for Elements.
>
> If we want to make the name more tied to TT, how about Elementts?
>
>
> On 10/19/06, Jonathan Rockway <jon [at] jrock> wrote:
>> The only thing that's really holding me back is deciding on a namespace
>> to put my fixes in. The original TTSite isn't under our control, I
>> don't think, so suggestions for names would be appreciated (as the
>> author of "Angerwhale", I'm no longer legally allowed to name software
>> projects ;)
>>
>>> Although I was planning for it to be more generic than just a Catalyst
>>> component (i.e. so you can use it to generate static sites), it makes a lot of
>>> sense to develop it with the specific aim of working with Catalyst.
>>>
>>> So consider me volunteered (although not for another month or so).
>> Thanks! I have no problems with trying to make things generic... I
>> think that's always a good idea.
>>
>> For now, I'm going to work on integrating TTSite with Catalyst a bit
>> nicer (config file, helpers, etc.), and from there we can start
>> integrating some more templates and styles.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Jonathan Rockway
>>
>> --
>> package JAPH;use Catalyst qw/-Debug/;($;=JAPH)->config(name => do {
>> $,.=reverse qw[Jonathan tsu rehton lre rekca Rockway][$_].[split //,
>> ";$;"]->[$_].q; ;for 1..4;$,=~s;^.;;;$,});$;->setup;
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Catalyst-dev mailing list
>> Catalyst-dev [at] lists
>> http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Catalyst-dev mailing list
> Catalyst-dev [at] lists
> http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev

_______________________________________________
Catalyst-dev mailing list
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http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev

pagaltzis at gmx

Oct 20, 2006, 10:16 AM

Post #35 of 44 (2614 views)
Permalink

Re: TTSite++ [In reply to]

* Ash Berlin <ash [at] cpan> [2006-10-20 11:50]:
> My vote would be to avoid "clever" names like Elementts
> - always a danger of people thinking its just a typo.
>
> Of course to combat this it could be ElemenTTs but my vote is
> still for Elements <-- plain, simple yet conveys something.

Plain, simple, and completely ungooglable.

Regards,
--
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>

_______________________________________________
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jon at jrock

Oct 20, 2006, 10:31 AM

Post #36 of 44 (2607 views)
Permalink

Re: TTSite++ [In reply to]

Exactly. Do a search for "Catalyst" and you'd have no idea our
framework even exists. Do a search for "Plagger" or "Angerwhale" and
100% of the results are relevant. Same goes for with delicious and
technorati.

Of course, people are unable to spell elements correctly, so ElemenTTs
already has 3000 results. *sigh*.

Interestingly "rails" is a common word too, but all the results are RoR.
*sigh again* :) Google is always interesting.

A. Pagaltzis wrote:
> * Ash Berlin <ash [at] cpan> [2006-10-20 11:50]:
>> My vote would be to avoid "clever" names like Elementts
>> - always a danger of people thinking its just a typo.
>>
>> Of course to combat this it could be ElemenTTs but my vote is
>> still for Elements <-- plain, simple yet conveys something.
>
> Plain, simple, and completely ungooglable.
>
> Regards,

--
package JAPH;use Catalyst qw/-Debug/;($;=JAPH)->config(name => do {
$,.=reverse qw[Jonathan tsu rehton lre rekca Rockway][$_].[split //,
";$;"]->[$_].q; ;for 1..4;$,=~s;^.;;;$,});$;->setup;

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kiki at bsdro

Oct 20, 2006, 11:37 AM

Post #37 of 44 (2628 views)
Permalink

Re: TTSite++ [In reply to]

Jonathan Rockway wrote:
> Exactly. Do a search for "Catalyst" and you'd have no idea our
> framework even exists. Do a search for "Plagger" or "Angerwhale" and
> 100% of the results are relevant. Same goes for with delicious and
> technorati.
>
> Of course, people are unable to spell elements correctly, so ElemenTTs
> already has 3000 results. *sigh*.
>
> Interestingly "rails" is a common word too, but all the results are RoR.
> *sigh again* :) Google is always interesting.
>
Yes, the miracle of Google Search Results.

OTOH, the RoR website has a GoogleRank of 8 (with 186000 backlinks),
while the Catalyst website has a GoogleRank of 7 (with only 1330
backlinks)...

The bottomline is that a little SEO wouldn't hurt... esp. since IMO, the
website design is due for an overhaul
(the trac site too, but that's a different beast)

_______________________________________________
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johncwang at gmail

Oct 20, 2006, 11:39 AM

Post #38 of 44 (2635 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

On 10/19/06, Zbigniew Lukasiak <zzbbyy [at] gmail> wrote:
>
> Going back to the marketing document I see one more thing that can be
> added there - some introduction why we at all need this marketing.

Thanks for bringing up the topic of goals. Setting the explictly will ensure
everyone is using the same assumptions as to what we are trying to achieve.
My view is that marketing serves the stakeholders and for the Catalyst
project I view the stakeholders as:

Catalyst Stakeholders:
- Catalyst project users (includes contributors)

Based on this I think the top goals these stakeholders would like to achieve
via marketing is:

Top Level Goals
- More Catalyst jobs
- More contributions to Catalyst

Jobs includes both corporations hiring directly employees as well as
outsourcing. Contributions to Catalyst includes code, tests, documentation,
bug reporting, blog articles, screen casts and the like.

From these top goals we can create a tree of requirements:

+ More Catalyst jobs
| + More organizations using Catalyst
| + Proven capability, scalability, productivity, etc.
| | + Case studies, blog articles, presentations
| | + Best of breed component selection/integration
| | while remaining flexible for enterprise needs
| + More Catalyst developers
| | + More Catalyst buzz, excitement
| | | + More Catalyst blog activity
| | | + More screen casts
| | | + More PM/YAPC/OSCON presentations
| | + Effective low cost hosting
| | + Easier to learn and use
| | | + Centralized API reference
| | | + Easy themeability
| | + Sufficient numbers of Perl developers
| | + More Perl buzz (hopefully accomplished via Cat buzz)
| + Improve Perl reputation
+ More contributions to Catalyst
+ More Catalyst developers
| ... (see above)
+ More organizations using Catalyst
... (see above)

This can and will be extended with types of organizations and types of
developers as has been mentioned already on this list. This and extra
details will be included in the next version of the marketing plan document.
This structure will allow us to prioritize things and balance efforts to
make sure we don't lose sight of the larger picture and goals. It also
allows us to trace all marketing activities back to the two goals for the
Catalyst user stakeholders: more jobs and more contributions.

There are also disadvantages - more people working with Catalyst means
> APIs need to be more static, any change would involve much more
> communication between parties etc.

The team decided to make the APIs more stable a while ago and there are
already many commercial projects using Catalyst that rely on this promise of
stability. This is documented in Catalyst::Manual::DevelopmentProcess .

--
John Wang
http://www.dev411.com/blog/

johncwang at gmail

Oct 20, 2006, 12:08 PM

Post #39 of 44 (2619 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

On 10/20/06, John Wang <johncwang [at] gmail> wrote:
>
> On 10/19/06, Zbigniew Lukasiak <zzbbyy [at] gmail> wrote:
> >
> > Going back to the marketing document I see one more thing that can be
> > added there - some introduction why we at all need this marketing.
>
>
> <snip> ... From these top goals we can create a tree of requirements:
>

I've put this list on EditGrid (built using Catalyst) for reference:

http://www.editgrid.com/user/CatalystMktg/Catalyst_Marketing_Activity_List

--
John Wang
http://www.dev411.com/blog/

dbix-class at trout

Oct 20, 2006, 1:08 PM

Post #40 of 44 (2615 views)
Permalink

Re: TTSite++ [In reply to]

Jonathan Rockway wrote:
> Exactly. Do a search for "Catalyst" and you'd have no idea our
> framework even exists. Do a search for "Plagger" or "Angerwhale" and
> 100% of the results are relevant. Same goes for with delicious and
> technorati.

I've always liked the idea of calling it after a specific catalyst - e.g.
Platinum or whatever ...

--
Matt S Trout Offering custom development, consultancy and support
Technical Director contracts for Catalyst, DBIx::Class and BAST. Contact
Shadowcat Systems Ltd. mst (at) shadowcatsystems.co.uk for more information

+ Help us build a better perl ORM: http://dbix-class.shadowcatsystems.co.uk/ +

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taylor.andrew.j at gmail

Oct 20, 2006, 2:49 PM

Post #41 of 44 (2611 views)
Permalink

Re: TTSite++ [In reply to]

On 10/20/06, Matt S Trout <dbix-class [at] trout> wrote:
>
> I've always liked the idea of calling it after a specific catalyst - e.g.
> Platinum or whatever ...
I like it! ++

Drew
--
----------------------------------------------------------------
Drew Taylor * Web development & consulting
Email: drew [at] drewtaylor * Site implementation & hosting
Web : www.drewtaylor.com * perl/mod_perl/DBI/mysql/postgres
----------------------------------------------------------------

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mromani at ottotecnica

Nov 6, 2006, 12:59 AM

Post #42 of 44 (2578 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

John Wang ha scritto:
> On 10/20/06, *John Wang* <johncwang [at] gmail
> <mailto:johncwang [at] gmail>> wrote:
>
> On 10/19/06, *Zbigniew Lukasiak* <zzbbyy [at] gmail
> <mailto:zzbbyy [at] gmail>> wrote:
>
> Going back to the marketing document I see one more thing that
> can be
> added there - some introduction why we at all need this marketing.
>
>
> <snip> ... From these top goals we can create a tree of requirements:
>
>
> I've put this list on EditGrid (built using Catalyst) for reference:
>
> http://www.editgrid.com/user/CatalystMktg/Catalyst_Marketing_Activity_List
> <http://www.editgrid.com/user/CatalystMktg/Catalyst_Marketing_Activity_List>

Ehm,

"Sorry, nothing is here.
Please check the URL for proper spelling. If you're having trouble
locating a destination that you are looking for, try visiting our home
page. "

:-)

>
> --
> John Wang
> http://www.dev411.com/blog/
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Catalyst-dev mailing list
> Catalyst-dev [at] lists
> http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst-dev

--
Marcello Romani
Responsabile IT
Ottotecnica s.r.l.
http://www.ottotecnica.com

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hkclark at gmail

Nov 6, 2006, 5:33 AM

Post #43 of 44 (2567 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

jshirley at gmail

Nov 6, 2006, 9:46 AM

Post #44 of 44 (2575 views)
Permalink

Re: Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft [In reply to]

On 11/6/06, hkclark [at] gmail <hkclark [at] gmail> wrote:
> On 10/17/06, John Wang <johncwang [at] gmail> wrote:
> > The Catalyst project has created a marketing team in addition to the dev and
> > doc teams. Currently jshirley and I are in marketing and anyone else who is
> > interested is welcome to join. Marketing serves to promote the product
> > (including docs) so it's important everyone is on the same page. My
> > intention is for marketing tasks to be defined the Marketing Plan and agreed
> > upon with the dev and doc teams. Once there is agreement, marketing can
> > start executing against the plan.
> >
>
> Hi John & jshirley,
>
> Many thanks for doing this -- it's a great idea.
>
> I have been lurking on the thread trying to collect my thoughts on the
> subject. Here is what I have so far:
>
> * I think a big part of the initial interest in Rails was generated by
> the really good demo movies they came out with. I think we should
> come up with at least one of those with a similar degree of polish. I
> volunteer to help.
>
> * I think the recent reports about Catalyst being significantly slower
> than Rails could be a real deterrent for new users. Yes, I know that
> there are many other factors that need to be considered besides raw
> transactions per second, but if word gets out that "Catalyst is slow"
> it could really hinder Catalyst adoption (how many of our clients want
> us using a framework that's is both "less hyped" *and* slower?). I
> think there are two main parts to addressing this:
> 1) Code: Look for was to optimize Catalyst and reduce bottlenecks.
> 2) Analysis: Drill down into the analysis to answer questions such as:
> - What types of things are faster in Rails?
> - What types of things are faster in Cat?
> - Does one favor larger vs. smaller vs. other types of apps?
> - What about if database ORM is taken into account (could DBIC make
> up for "slowness" in Cat to get things back on par)?
> Unfortunately, I don't know enough Rails to add much value to this item.
>
> * I agree with others on the thread who state: while the flexibility
> of Catalyst should be emphasized, there should be a "recommended way
> of doing things" for most applications. To much talk of options up
> front will turn people off before they ever ramp up.
>
> * Articles, books, blogs, and talks. The Rails team is a "machine"
> when it comes to this area. I know this has been talked about
> previously in this thread, but I figured it was worth restating. For
> example, I think we should approach O'Reilly again about a Catalyst
> book. Also, would it be possible to get some high profile Catalyst
> folks to participate in the No Fluff, Just Stuff tour? I know we
> already have some coverage at the various YAPCs, but one can never do
> too much of that.
>
> * I liked the idea of having some canned VMWare images where people
> could grab the image and instantly get going with trying out Catalyst
> (http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/community). There
> was some talk about this around 6 months ago, but I don't think it
> ever went anywhere. I think I could help with a CentOS image.
>
> Just my 2 cents,
> Kennedy
>

Hey Kennedy,

I'm working on some screencasts now and have the test apps pretty
stable (msg me on IRC if you want to see them). I'm waiting on the
next maintenance release, and the new site design until they go out.
I'll possibly get them put together, but I wanted to do a screencast
on installing Catalyst along with it, but I may not wait for that,
since I think the screencasts showing the usage of Catalyst are more
important.

Neil, the author of iShowU graciously donated a license for iShowU to
the Catalyst project as well. Let me know if you want the information
to start doing your own casts (although the software is OSX only)

-Jay

--
J. Shirley :: jshirley [at] gmail :: Killing two stones with one bird...
http://www.toeat.com - http://code.toeat.com/~jshirley

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