On 07/04/2013 10:20 PM, Benedikt Ritter wrote: > Hi, > > we had this discussion lately where we talked about attracting new > contributors for commons [1]. Over the past few days I've been thinking > about this topic again and I've come to the conclusion that there are > several things we could do to improve our "public relations". > > Here is a list of things that I would like to change (and by this I mean, > that I volunteer to do the work ;-) > > 1. Make commons more visible in coding social media > - request git mirrors for every proper component, so that everything is > also at github > - add all proper components to Ohloh (and clean up the existing ones) > - create a Twitter account where we can post news from commons. The Mesos > project already has such an account. [2] > > 2. Make the website more attractive > - Use a modern design - I don't know who said it, but I loved it when > someone said "our website looks like we're java 1.3 users". Well, this is > true. Simone made several attempts to make commons switch to the maven > fluido skin [3,4,5]. I think the time has come to finally do something > about the website.
I like the design of the log4j2 site, I am unsure if it is based on fluido or actually the same, but something like this I would like to see for commons too. The current design looks so old and rusty and can give a wrong impression on the state of the project. Website design in general and of open-source projects has greatly improved in the last couple of years, we should not stay behind. I am not so much into the social coding stuff, although I find it quite nice, especially if somebody else handles it ;-). Otoh, the single most important factor to attract users and/or contributors is simply to actively maintain the project and try to be better than competing libs, imho. There are several examples of components that were probably great a few years ago, but are now way behind other libs in terms of features, usability, java language support, community. Personally, I think we should be more open to deprecate components that are not maintained for years and have better alternatives. Right now, commons sometimes looks like a graveyard of once cool stuff (with a few exceptions). Cut it down to well maintained and really used libs, and probably more people will think that commons is a good place to develop new stuff / components. Thomas --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@commons.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@commons.apache.org
