Feedback on SpreadCocoon, and a suggestion for CocoonGT.org

[Mark Leicester <ma...@efurbishment.com>]

Hello everyone,

Now that SpreadCocoon (http://www.spreadcocoon.com) has been running 
for a month or so, I want to talk with the list about how we/I can make 
the site better and more useful to the Cocoon community.

I've added an events calendar (http://www.spreadcocoon.com/event), 
which all registered users are welcome to post to. If you are staging a 
meeting, stammtisch or whatever this may be a good alternative to the 
wiki (where events stay visible long after they have passed in time). 
At the moment I'm trawling the wiki and people's blogs looking for 
notices of conferences, meetings etc.; please feel free to added your 
events to this calendar too!

What I'd like to see evolve in SpreadCocoon:
* Enhancements to the skin, to make it more Cocoon branded. What are 
people's thoughts about the degree to which Cocoon is a distinctive 
brand?
* Community use of the community events calendar: promoting the 
GetTogether alongside the cocoongt site.
* More "Cocoon in the wild" sites, with more input from the creators as 
to how Cocoon helped them achieve their goals.
* Activity counters showing download statistics and mailing list 
activity.
* Answers to the question "What is Cocoon?" with pointers to flagship 
products built on Cocoon.

Any comments? Any other ideas?

Probably the #1 FAQ is "Why is SpreadCocoon powered by Drupal (i.e. not 
Cocoon)?" (http://drupal.org). I see now that the Spring site is 
powered by Drupal (http://www.springframework.org/), and it seems that 
JavaLobby are looking at Drupal too (but calling for Java alternatives 
- see http://www.javalobby.org/nl/archive/jlnews_20050405o.html). 
Someone said to me offline, "I think Drupal is a nice fit there, with 
its 'leaky abstractions everywhere'" and I'd tend to agree. What do 
others think?

Steven, it occurs to me that Drupal may be well suited to the CocoonGT 
site. Drupal offers ecommerce modules (Worldpay, Paypal, invoicing 
etc.) and plenty of people have used Drupal for exactly this kind of 
purpose (see http://drupal.org/node/5931). I'd be more than willing to 
build such a site.

Best regards,
Mark

Re: Feedback on SpreadCocoon, and a suggestion for CocoonGT.org

[Steven Noels <st...@outerthought.org>]

On 10 May 2005, at 19:20, Mark Leicester wrote:

> Steven, it occurs to me that Drupal may be well suited to the CocoonGT 
> site. Drupal offers ecommerce modules (Worldpay, Paypal, invoicing 
> etc.) and plenty of people have used Drupal for exactly this kind of 
> purpose (see http://drupal.org/node/5931). I'd be more than willing to 
> build such a site.

Thanks for the offer. It's not a matter of NIH nor forcing one's own 
dogfood onto somebody else, but I hooked up the cocoongt.org website 
onto the existing cocoondev.org machinerie, as this was the easiest 
thing to do for me. It took me all of 10 minutes.

I'm sure Drupal is cool and all that, and Dries 
(http://www.buytaert.net/resume/#drupal) works about a mile from our 
offices, and I have a standing lunch invitation from him. I like your 
ideas with SpreadCocoon - yet I'd love to see people build these things 
on top of Cocoon. I know people do, and I've been running a shared 
development environment for Cocoon-related projects for quite a while 
now, yet I see very few being packaged as standalone applications. A 
pity.

That, and a workable documentation platform, are things which I care 
very much for. Getting to know PHP from a sysadmin perspective is less 
enticing. ;)

</Steven>
-- 
Steven Noels                            http://outerthought.org/
Outerthought - Open Source Java & XML            An Orixo Member
Read my weblog at            http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/
stevenn at outerthought.org                stevenn at apache.org