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I have intentionally kept a little quiet in this because although I have a B.Sc. in sales and marketing of technical products, I have always found marketing to be a tough one to quantify without resorting to gut feelings and intuition.
I also wanted to see, what you could come up with of ideas before "putting the foot down" as it will always be, when an official member gives his opinion.
One of the fuzzy things is what you want exactly from the official XOOPS team, Ken. Am I right in thinking that you want something comparable to pages 3 to 5 of the OpenOffice marketing plan to build on?
To give my initial views:
1) Search engines are fine, and getting more people visit this site would be good - however, we HAVE many users, we HAVE many visitors. What I want is that when someone does get to this site, relevant information is available and easy to find.
2) Having many users is not a goal in itself. I am not doing all this work in order to satisfy someone in Texas, who learn about XOOPS next week. I am doing it for YOU. You, who already know about XOOPS and use it on your site. I'm doing it for you, who are thinking about trading XOOPS for another CMS (hopefully making you change your mind). I'm doing it for myself, because it will reflect well on me to be part of a respected project.
I want reviewers and journalists to be able to review XOOPS and honestly say that it is a good product that they can recommend.
[Competitors]
We are up against tough competition. There are commercial systems such as MS SharePoint, Sitecore and others. There are open source systems such as Xaraya, PostNuke, Mambo and OpenSourceCMS. What do we have that they don't have? Two strengths, I do think we can use: Easy to setup, easy to trial (especially relevant in competition with the commercial systems) and focus on security (relevant in competition with the other OS PHP systems)
[Conclusion]
My personal opinion is that we should aim at increasing the market share in the area of small and medium enterprises that need interaction on their websites (not just static information pages), have multiple roles in managing the content (e.g. providers, editors and approvers) and have IT responsible employees.
The last one perhaps needs a little explanation: XOOPS does not have a lot of consultants connected to the project, we cannot guarantee support and we cannot (yet) guarantee quality of 3rd party modules etc. Therefore XOOPS is not a viable solution, in my eyes, for a small company without IT personnel who can learn the system and provide internal support.
A more long term goal could very well be that it should be usable by anyone, regardless of IT knowledge, but XOOPS as of today is not like that, I think, and that is what we should focus on: How XOOPS is right now.