[Evangelism] Re: "Top 15 Questions..." Final Draft

[Donna Snow]

This has been an interesting thread to follow, and I'll tell you why.

At the Summit in Feb 2008, I sat in front of 50 plus people and essentially
said, "Plone is too hard" I'm not lazy, and I'm not stupid (my associates
are not stupid either :-)) That said it doesn't matter whether I'm leading a
training class online or a class in person I get the same comment.  "Plone
documentation does not meet our needs", that is not to say that
documentation "sucks" but that it just isn't enough. Hence the online
classes and my drive to train more people to use Plone. I am the first one
to say, "look the documentation team volunteer their time" and "this is an
Open Source project and a volunteer effort". That calms them down a bit but
it's still out there. I have attempted to help with documentation but have a
large family to support so I haven't been as diligent as I'd hoped I could
be.We have a great documentation team but Plone is HUGE and changing every
day, so how do we cope with those changes and keep the user base?

I, like Chris, want to continue to use Plone, I've been using it for a long
time. My baby girl was 4 years old when I started with Plone, she is now 12.
Plone is a regularly uttered word in this household (sometimes accompanied
with a swear word or two) and I talk about/evangelize it all the time. Plone
has huge, huge, huge potential and it has come a long way since I started
using it. This is why I stick around. That and I truly feel that the Plone
community is the strongest most supportive Open Source community.

Let's get real though. We can't force Plone and it's image to be what we
"envision" it to be. We have to deal with the reality.

We have to step back and let someone who has never used Plone try to install
it (without our guidance)
I know even now when I install Plone on a new server I'm met with PIL issues
and gcc (linux) but I know how to get around them (mainly due to poor
planning on my part, but new users will not have everything setup ahead of
time). I wouldn't presume that someone who hasn't "grown" with Plone would
know how to handle those issues. I had 3 different OS's at my last session
and I had to help each and every one of them install Plone.

I have seen a huge push to make it easier for the end-user. I'm so proud of
the community for working so hard to make Plone friendlier. It already
rocks, my clients love it, once I get them past the hump.

It's easy to "think" that something is "easy" when you work with it day in
and day out.

Why not have an "install fest" of some sort to see just how easy it is for a
potential user?

If it is and I'm proven wrong, then terrific, if not, then let's open up the
conversation to making Plone easy to install.Calvin's recent blog post is a
good start.

Best Regards,
Donna M Snow, Principal
C Squared Enterprises
illuminating your path to Open Source
http://www.csquaredtech.com



On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 8:59 AM, Dylan Jay <djay at pretaweb.com> wrote:

> On 17/04/2009, at 1:24 AM, Chris Barnes wrote:
>
>  If you want to evangelize people into using Plone - a good start might be
>> to have tutorials at WPD (rather than have it be a pep rally).
>>
>
> I think a lot of people have given tutorials. but from some of the groups I
> talked to it was mostly to existing plone users which perhaps isn't
> spreading the word as intended.
>
> We're going to be giving a talk to students at a university who might not
> have heard of Plone. We're not exactly sure yet what we're going to say that
> will make them give plone a try. but I think you made a good point that
> Plone is a tool and new developers are perhaps our best market for Plone and
> business decision makers don't care that much (or at least care more about
> sales people and size of the company providing support). So we'll be saying
> something along the line that Plone is a developers CMS, if you had one
> arrow in your quiver then plone would be the one you want. As Martin put it,
> when other CMS's say no, plone will often say yes.
> What would really help is some extreme examples of plone versatility.
> Anyone got some good stories?
>
>
>
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>
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