Serendipity Forums

Zoran, your s9y fighting plan is great! I must admit that I'm too tight in my schedule to get involved in this, but if you give me announcements to make on blog.s9y.org or HTML templates/graphics to implement on the servers, I'll talk it up with Jannis and post/implement that. Would be great if we got something out of this!

I think that coders know that s9y is a technically great platform. We need the average user mass to get to know it and to start using it instead of the other software. I would definately say: drop PHP! (at least in the tagline and logo )

Actually, the "PHP" in our logo and title is what gets many people attracted. They search for "php blog" where we score quite high.

After all, Serendipity is strifed for good PHP usage, and I really worship that fact. Serendipity IS made easy as much as possible for the average user.

But my personal goal is to allow all geeks and PHP/Smarty pro's to get Serendipity to do what they want. This is were we overcome Wordpress - in flexibility, better coding and a solid technical foundation for plugins.

Best regards,
Garvin

garvinhicking wrote:Zoran, your s9y fighting plan is great! I must admit that I'm too tight in my schedule to get involved in this, but if you give me announcements to make on blog.s9y.org or HTML templates/graphics to implement on the servers, I'll talk it up with Jannis and post/implement that. Would be great if we got something out of this!

Thanks, good to hear! I'm in between deadlines too, but I'll do what I can. Any help from others that can spare some time is greatly appreciated.

What we need now is for everyone to punch holes in the plan in order to make it stronger (check rules, check deliverables, check announce sites, etc.). After that, we can start!

garvinhicking wrote:Actually, the "PHP" in our logo and title is what gets many people attracted. They search for "php blog" where we score quite high.

Lets kick it out of the logo, but keep it findable on "php blog" and the likes. We want more developers, without a doubt! But we want even more users I guess.

garvinhicking wrote:But my personal goal is to allow all geeks and PHP/Smarty pro's to get Serendipity to do what they want. This is were we overcome Wordpress - in flexibility, better coding and a solid technical foundation for plugins.

That s9y is the superior product is a great starting point. Lets now make sure that it appeals to users in that they drop WP and switch now

Zz.

RobA wrote:And I would suggest either combined with this (or separate) a template chooser sample.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding, but it sounds like a sidebar plugin? That's the way it works in Joomla.

RobA wrote: [...] It took me a long time of staring at the logo to even know that it is an empty cup and spoon on a saucer (top view - in case anyone can't figure it out [...]

Haha, I think you made the point btw: I had the exact same experience with the logo.

RobA wrote:And I will ask one question NOT answered in the FAQ... why a coffee cup?

Perhaps because it was called jBlog before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serendipit ... _software)

(or was that because of the orignal authors initials?)

Z.

RobA wrote:(Also, the trend in marketing and branding is for logos to be stylistic rather than photorealistic...principally to allow it to cross media easily - colour and black/white variations, two or 4 colour rather than full spectrum for printing, and ability to reduce in contrast to provide watermarking/background identification).

Did you see the new http://www.mozilla.com website? I think it's a pretty good example of clean branding. Obviously they are branding more than one product, but there is a clear style combining them all together.

I also like the interaction a lot!
- Simple & clean
- Only a couple of main menu items
- Big 'download now' button
- Features / USP's, combined with partial screenshots

garvinhicking wrote: ...

After all, Serendipity is strifed for good PHP usage, and I really worship that fact. Serendipity IS made easy as much as possible for the average user.

But my personal goal is to allow all geeks and PHP/Smarty pro's to get Serendipity to do what they want. This is were we overcome Wordpress - in flexibility, better coding and a solid technical foundation for plugins.

Best regards,
Garvin

We are certainly privileged to have such skilled & supportive coders for s9y. Like I've said before, the support on this site is outstanding and will certainly generate a loyal following

Though there's a difference between attracting a coding community, and a general user community who probably grasp that php needs to be on their webserver, but after that, they nothing more about coding. I fit into this latter category of an ethusiastic non-coder user at the moment

Now if we look on the ratings link on opensourcecms http://www.opensourcecms.com/index.php? ... Itemid=143
and compare Nucleus, Textpattern and s9y.
They all have received a similar number of hits/views, but the vote count for s9y is far less that the other two. (I'm not talking about the vote result for s9y which is quite good and beats wordpress, but the number of people who have voted for s9y)
The relatively low number suggests that potential users are looking at s9y, but aren't exploring the website enough to find out about it, try it out enough and then vote, compared with other blogs.

So the move to redesign a welcoming site would be a good thing as many have indicated on this thread

Any thoughts on The Plan? Please shoot!

I would think that the christmas break (if any) can be a nice time for people to do some logo hacking (or is after the break a better time?). This would mean that we should announce around the 12th of December.

We could run the contest for 4 weeks. We could start voting January 9 and start the vote soon after so that we have a winner by January 16.

In order to continue, I need your input!

- What is missing in The Plan? Or is it complete?
- Where it says 'need more' I need more items, do you know of any? For your convenience, here are the items that are incomplete:
--> deliverables (logo formats etc.)
--> rules for contest (did I miss out on anything?)
--> sites/communities of designers where we can post an announce
--> sites/communities on OSS blog/cms
- How about the proposed timeschedule?

So, if you could dump some brain on this, we can get started.

Best regards,
Zoran

p.s.: sorry for the nagging tone of voice

I am a very recent user of s9y. I have no prior experience in blogging, have no freaking idea what I am doing, no relevant coding experience - NADA.

However, the net is one big library to me, and through it, I found s9y. It is a miracle that I ever found this forum - links from the ORG site were difficult to find.

I just tripped across this particular thread as I searched for answers to my own questions. GREAT THREAD!!! Fantastic ideas, echoing many of my own thoughts. sy9 is just waiting to be discovered, but it sits hidden behind false representations.

I was looking at Mamb0 pages lately for another project I am considering. Clean. Well branded. Makes me as a user think they are top in their game. BTW - I've seen references to the fact that Mambo is no longer Mambo, but Joomla.... or that both exist. Confusing.

Anyway - the fact remains that I was really impressed by how polished their site was. There is a post here somewhere from Garvin (great guy, incredibly helpful) comparing s9y to other blogsoftware - he made a reference to the comparison between MS Windows & OS2, and how OS2 was superior, but MS Windows won the battle due to superior marketing.

Great observation, and I concur, but I hope s9y does not suffer the same fate! This project is better than it's current state of PR. Need to stick a PR person in the team and rectify that!

Zoran has some excellent ideas!!!! I think we have a PR candidate for the team!!!!!!!!

Like all great libraries the Internet is fundamentally flawed. The results of your search can only be derived from the words you input into the search string. The algorithms used to find the answer you seek do not therefore have any clear understanding of what you're thinking, and an interpretation based on other user searches is applied.

To get serendipity into your immediate field of vision we either need to manipulate the search engines, or if we are being ethical, we need to build up our content, userbase, and concurrently support other related technologies. In this way the existing algorithms will naturally filter serendipity to the top of your results.

You can help with this project. Mention serendipity in your own blog, contribute themes or plugin code, suggest usability enhancements, add to the documentation, help other users on this very forum. The people who genuinely want to help serendipity (like yourself) get noticed very quickly. By the way, where is your blog, your profile is woefully empty.

Carl