I think Dave Koelmeyer said: >> The original question raised (not by me) on this same thread was "Open Discussion - How to [increase] JSPWiki publicity ..." (implying – correctly – there is a lack of publicity), and was asked way back April 2014. There were I think three responses, but no real discussion took place. It's not a new issue, more an actual discussion which didn't happen at the time. If there is less visibility for JSPWiki, there are less folks discovering and actively using it – leading to problems which you've experienced with folks using it on alternate app servers, for instance. If you look at other healthy open source projects, specifically alternative wiki products such as MediaWiki, they have a level of publicity absent in JSPWiki. The target audience isn't folks like you and me who have been using it for years, it's those prospective users who simply don't know about it. Note what's missing from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software for example. <<
LOL Now I recall why I rejected MediaWiki: PHP :-p Been there, done that. No thanks, I'll gladly take my chances with JSP. Of course, if you're used to WordPress or Drupal, and you're looking for a wiki, then MediaWiki might be the solution. One might ask "What's the benefit of a wiki over blogware anyway?" >> In terms of "pushing as a corporate solution", I'm not pushing for anything as such, other than greater visibility. Corporate deployment is just one highly-applicable use case in which JSPWiki can (with the right requirements) compete. I run an open source consultancy, and I would just *love* to be able to offer JSPWiki as a commercial hosted service for small-medium-sized businesses, and be able to contribute back to the project with tangible resources. Absent that – due to some lingering problems with HADDOCK and the drawbacks with the legacy interface – contributing some free time to raising publicity is the next best thing I can offer. I really like JSPWiki's strengths (ease of setup, mostly ease of use, streamlined and no bloat, no separate database to manage, open source, and so on), but if a slide into obscurity is on the horizon, I'll switch to another product. << I'll give you a use-case -- true story. I tried (without success) to get people using JSPWiki internally in our faculty (Agriculture and Environment at the University of Sydney). At first, the majority were all gung-ho about using a wiki.. that was no problem. The barrier to entry was that they expected it to install like installing MS Word or something. Just a "one-shot and it just works" experience. As soon as I explained that they had to first install a servlet container (what's a servlet??!?!!) and fill out all this configuration stuff, they quickly lost interest. For non-techies, it was just too much overhead. The other thing is that virtually all the users were in the Windows environment, and most were very unfamiliar with the UNIX/LINUX environment. So, if we want to increase adoption, one plan of attack might be to: * Target the Windows platform first. * Make the installation, with all its dependencies (including Tomcat running as a Windows service), as transparent as possible to new users via customizable installation scripts/batch files. * We can provide different kinds of pre-configured installation templates/options like: - install as public wiki (this would close all the permissions and security that are wide open on the basic install and only allow admins to edit/delete). - install as private, single-user wiki (this would be like my developer's journal installation) - install with the following defined groups and roles (for people who already have a user structure in mind). - custom installation (the traditional installation where the user sets all the properties) * Provide some kind of control panel like the Tomcat App Manager so non-techies don't have to fiddle with editing text files. I know that this is an anathema to developers, but non-programmers really hate doing "anything" that resembles programming. Just a few ideas. Cheers, Jason Jason C. Morris | PhD Candidate (ABD) Department of Environmental Sciences | Faculty of Agriculture and Environment THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY, NSW, 2006 phone: +61 02 8627 1152
