The new year has shown a lot of new activities regarding the xoops.org website, development of XOOPS and also the start of the Spread XOOPS project.

To use a consistent way of communication, a subforum for this project has been created. I suggest we use this subforum from now on for new posts regarding this project, so that we are all able to find Spread XOOPS related forum posts in one subforum.

The Spread XOOPS project is an open community project, as it naturally should be. This means every member of the community is invited to participate in this project by sharing ideas, helping with the organisation, develop specific items, write articles, etc.

What action points do we have so far? Below you will find a living list of items that need to be done for this project. I tried to make the list as complete as possible, but I am sure that I could easily have overlooked something. Feel free to let me know of anything left out.

Dedicated promotion section on xoops.org
• Create new subforum for feedback on the project [DONE]
• Suggest guidelines for writing articles and promotional materials
• See if polls can be beneficial for the progress of the campaign
• Prepare a section for information of the XOOPS promotion campaign

XOOPS web exposure
• Collect a list of websites that could service as a download site for XOOPS, for example http://www.downloads.com.
• Prepare a module for the collection of companies and contact details of press contacts and media companies.
• Investigate if an affiliate program would be useful for the Spread XOOPS project.

Promotional materials
• Have the logo images ready in the OfficialLogoKit [DONE]
• Inform about the progress with the promo CD (AFUX) and if this could be used by other local sites as well and by the xoops.org members.
• Write articles to promote XOOPS
• Create factsheets and flyers
• Create new banners
• Create new themes

Other exposure of XOOPS
• Prepare a press release for the Spread XOOPS project (when the kickoff really takes place)
• Prepare a section for media/press, in which press related information can be found easily.
• Find alternative merchandising companies to the CafePress site.
• Find conferences and similar events that XOOPS could use for the promotion of the product.

Other
• Investigate possibilities for using packages like Fantastico auto installer and RPM package that could be of benefit to the popularity of XOOPS.

======================================

How can you participate in this? Simply post your ideas on this forum, help develop promotion materials or write articles for XOOPS . If you want to take on any of the items above, you are very welcome to do so. To make sure we are not all doing the same thing, a PM or an e-mail to wtravel at xoops.org with what you would like to do will be helpful.

About:"Suggest guidelines for writing articles and promotional materials"

This is really important.
I supose to make articles in 2 directions:
- no much tecnicals articles to magazines and websites but to inform the advantages of the system in a general way, to conquer webmasters that still they use static sites in HTML.

- more tecnical: speed compare with others CMS, the advantages of Smarty, etc..


Other info is the version of xampp (Apache, MySQL, PHP4 and 5,) with automatic XOOPS install made by the brazilian support site http://www.xoops.net.br, is a good idea make this in any local support to send to magazines and downloads sites.


my 2cents

-- Find, contact and update the software companies that provide or should provide XOOPS in their packages. (thinking Fantastico, which XOOPS is on, and 4PSA Integrator repository, which XOOPS is not on) But need to make sure they always have the latest versions quickly. And possibly offer the 2 versions at times of change like this.

any news about this?

Quote:
It's funny how it sometimes works.

I was working on starting a new marketing campaign for XOOPS, when I accidentally run into this one article! It was perfect!

Now, almost two years to the date from your post, we'll have another try on making this happen. This time with a very motivated community from around the world! Together we'll make a difference and make this happen!!!

I'll help by making new themes (but I'm very bad in PHP at the moment, so modules won't be released yet). I can offer hosting for this project too for free, and I would love to maintain the site. I hope I can help :) - I've ordered spreadxoops.com and spreadxoops.org and I'll maintain it, but I would want to make this something of the community, and therefore I would want to hear anyone's suggestions! :)

Kevin

Vamptrix, thank you so much for your offer to help. This is so important that our community jumps in and helps!!!!

I follow up in the other thread...

We won't need any extra server for it, as we will keep all the info here.

But we need help with spreading the word. Which country do you live in and what languages can you help with? For example, when we have a press release, we will need translations.

What else could you do to promote XOOPS in your community/country where you live?

The pleasure is mine Mamba :)
I'm thinking more of a project like SpreadFirefox - which is seperate of the project itself.
The site shouldn't contain too much technical information at the beginning but just help out beginning users and more advanced users by providing tutorials at this site and provide information about general stuff.

About the server, I've ordered a hosting package for spreadfirefox.com already :)

I speak Dutch, I'm from Belgium. I can help with Dutch and English (my French ain't that good but I can help myself a bit).

I can try to spread the word and I try to spread the word about XOOPS as much as I can, nearly all my sites run XOOPS already, and I plan to advertise a bit more about XOOPS. I also try to help anyone that asks questions about XOOPS. And ofcourse I'll try to do more :)

Now, what modules do you suggest I would run on the site? Everybody can say whatever they think is best!
And we would need a theme too, I'll try to make one soon, but if anyone wants to make another one, he can do this too.

We will also need a logo - anything that's creative and colorful will do.. anybody has any ideas?

This site is going to be made by the community, not only by me, that's my goal: making a community driven site, a place where anybody can talk about XOOPS and find easy information, while this site will be for the more advanced users (this site really is hard for new users to understand at first, even I have to search a long while before I find some things, and when you've found it, you might have scared quite a few users ;) )

Hi Vamptrix,

Once the project is up and running, i.e. we have enough content and supporters, we have planned to have it as a subdomain here, i.e. http://spread.xoops.org

The experience that we've made is that we don't want to have different Websites all over the place, but instead have them here - a "one stop shopping" approach

But right now I think, it's still premature to talk about the project Website, as the project didn't even start. Actually, it didn't really take off the first time around, so we have to be more prudent and focus this time

The Website itself is only a vehicle, one of many. The challenge for us it to define what we have to do to to spread the word, what messages, what content, and then how we'll deliver, and where.

I hope, it makes sense...