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What Can Plone Learn From Ruby On Rails' Marketing?
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Plone and Ruby on Rails aren't the same thing, but there's a lot Plone can learn about marketing and building mindshare for an open-source toolkit.
So, the buzz this week among web developers is the new Ruby on Rails site. For a new product with a rather small number of users, they sure have a lot of buzz. How do they do that?
As my colleague Steve Andersen pointed out, they do a great job of breaking down their core message and presenting it in digestible chunks with pretty pictures.
What lessons should the Plone community learn from their polished efforts?
Plone isn't doing so bad
I think Plone's marketing in that respect is already pretty good. Plone has its core message on the website as the first thing you see and it has some nice pictures (like the personal ad). I guess the start page could be simplified a little, but not without losing some functionality (displaying news feed, events, products, etc.). That doesn't mean that one can't think about some streamlining; you can always find things that need improvement.
The real problem is Zope's image. Zope and RoR play in the same league, so Ruby's slickness doesn't actually hurt Plone as much as it does Zope. In my latest blog entry, http://www.z3lab.org/sections/blogs/philipp-weitershausen/, I describe what we as a Zope community need to do. I'm explicitly targeting Plone people with that urge, too. It should be in their interest that Zope has a good image; people developing Plone will inevitably hit Zope sooner or later and their experience with it will add to their good or bad evaluation of Plone itself.