Let's spread a word about ocPortal

Hi Guys,

These days before Christmas are paradoxical, because a the same time we feel happier feeling that something special is coming and we also are getting more and more …tired and frustrated. Oh gosh, each year I promise myself to stop to be crazy and not allow myself to be sucked by this "mad" crowd of people chasing through shops and supermarkets for tons of gifts, food, drinks, and all this lovely Christmas stuff. Each year at the beginning of December I hope to rationally plan my schedule to have enough time for everything - family life, fulfilling duties and having some leisure time. And always is the same, all my efforts are in vain. I have no enough time!!!   Guys, do you experience the same or you are luckily live somewhere in Paradise where this beautiful "pre-Christmas disease"  is not known?

I'm writing all of this to justify my present absence in ocPortal life. I know that I'm delayed in almost everything serious here - there is still no Polish version of ocPortal available and moreover my hopes to translate it are long far from being accomplished.  Sorry for this, but I have to ask everybody for a bit of patience…

But, I have something for you which could be treated as a Christmas gift. Let me now to explain it.

Guys, beside of ocPortal community, I personally try to support the other one, where 3 weeks ago I started a sort of a advertizing campaign, named "Let's spread a word about our favorite CMS". I had some ideas, but sharing them on the forums I was not absolutely convinced that this would make any sense and that anybody else would follow my propositions. To my great surprise, results were fantastic, much above the expectations. To make the story short, …in the period of 3 weeks, on the very well known CMS review website - OpensourceCMS, the overall score of that CMS in the voting system increased from 3.1 to 3.5  Why shouldn't we follow here this path?  

It is a sad thing, deeply discussed here on this forums already, that ocPortal being so good, is at the same time unrecognizable on wider public area. We should definitely try to change that. That is why, for the beginning I propose to start the same campaign here.

First of all, it is a shame that OCP has only 3.1 rating on the OpensourceCMS So, please everybody who has never ever visited that site (I know from the review published there that some of you have already been there), go there, vote for ocPortal and write a nice comment about your favorite CMS.
 
Voting system looks like that:

To cast a very good vote on ocPortal you have to press first star on the right (if you hover over this star all five stars will be lighten up); remember from the certain IP address you can assign only one vote, so do not make a mistake, there won't be later a chance to change your mind.

Commenting system looks like that:

No need to give any instructions. Some of our friends here have already submitted there some excellent posts.

I think that OpensourceCMS website deserves our efforts, as this an unique place where people can freely submit their reviews as well as vote for their favorite CMS. And it is very popular among people who look for a new, interesting CMS solutions. Have a look at the proof -the right upper corner of that site:


Whenever you visit that website, each time you can check out how many people are reading that page at the moment - usually this number is somewhere between 5 and 9 hundreds. Not bad for a start of our campaign - so, please yote for the ocPortal.

Guys, floor is your now and let achieve at least 4 star rank as other famous CMS systems over there

And of course Merry Christmas to all of you!

 

C'mon Guys!

I don't believe my eyes. It has passed three days and there were only 2 (two) additional votes cast over there. Why so poor? Should I believe that everybody here voted there already? OK let assume that it is true…, but what about your relatives and friends? Could you ask them to vote for ocPortal, please?

Present situation is like this:

I only vote for products I use. And yes, I've already voted in the past. And I don't vote high on stuff just to make it go up in points or stars. Not saying I voted low for ocPortal tho… I really like ocPortal… so I will say it was no less than 4 stars.

Yes, there are those who do vote high… and then there are those who vote low just for their own personal vendetta.

I think it was stated by ocProducts in a previous "vote for us" link that they prefer you to vote, but do it honestly (just like in elections).

I don't want to sound crude to your post, but it's coming across as if you want others to vote and to tell everyone else to vote 5s…. just so ocPortal looks good on their site. Now this may not be your intention and you just want others to go vote… but if they haven't used the product, why would they vote?

Best thing to do is to continue to find sites that are showcasing CMS Portals and if they don't have ocPortal on them, then share your experiences with ocPortal to them and ask them to try it out themselves and see if they want to add it to their listings.

Eric thank you very much for your post. It is usually a nice thing to have a chance for a nice discussion.  
 
So, here is my reasoning. I can't stand the situation that ocPortal is steadily classified on a very popular review website on the poor 66th position. According to my knowledge (hopefully shared by most active members here), this powerful CMS definitely deserves to be evaluated much better. You said, that your rating in a case of ocPortal:

Eric said

was no less than 4 stars

I'm about to say it is a fair score, which means that if everybody cast similar vote, our CMS would be ranked somewhere between the second and the 15th place. And that would be OK, because I do strongly believe that ocPOrtal is as good as Drupal, Modx, CMS Made Simple, PHP-Fusion, TYPO3, XOOPS (not to mention Joomla) and I think that this is a suitable "neighborhood" for it in this sort of a "competition". Unfortunately, for many reasons it is not working like that and our CMS - saying metaphorically - has not a slightest chance to be elected a "president" nowadays.
 
Let me stick to this "political" metaphor. I'm convinced that being a member of CMS community is to some extent like being in electoral committee of hypothetical politician. Knowing her/his potential I would have a good right to believe that voting for a candidate whom I support is the good and proper deed. In such a case I would do a lot to change people minds and to try to convince them to assign their votes to my candidate. I think you agree with me that it would be crazy to appeal to them and at the same time to admit loudly that she/he is not a perfect guy and because of that start to enumerate publically her/his drawbacks.  
 
So returning to ocPortal case I feel I have a good right to spread a word about it, appeal to people to cast 5 star vote, explain them how to do it and where to post a nice review (by the way many thanks to Jean Gosselin who added yesterday his comment on OpensourceCMS)…  in other words to efficiently advertize the ocPortal wherever it is possible. And moreover I think that the only active and fervent advertizing may bring peoples' attention to ocPortal and make them keen on trying it.

I agree with you that we should continue looking for sites

Eric said

that are showcasing CMS Portals and if they don't have ocPortal on them, then share your experiences with ocPortal to them and ask them to try it out themselves and see if they want to add it to their listings

but I think it is not enough. We may like this or not, but the contemporary world behaves in silly manner and people follow others "like a flock of sheep", and all of those who look for new CMS systems always choose rather something which gained excellent score than something which is located deep down on the rank. For ocPortal it is not a very nice scenario: no newcomers because of low evaluation and low rank because of the lack of new, satisfied users. This must be resolved and peoples' tendency to overvalue rankings must not be ignored.

That is why, having in mind an excellent result in applying this tactic in other CMS community,  I have proposed us to be a little bit more active …in voting. Primarily I was thinking about all newcomers who came here from time to time to check out the ocPortal. I wanted them to see that we …care and we invite everybody to support us. And please relax Eric , as my idea of

Hobbis said

but what about your relatives and friends?

was simply a joke to tease you and provoke here a discussion.  At the end of the day it brought the positive result in… your response.

All right then. Shouldn't we ask Chris to embed somewhere on the forums (or on the main page of the website) a bunch of banners asking people to vote for ocPortal? Maybe any other ideas? If we start today we have some good odds to improve ocPortal chances for being taken into consideration when the new Packt Publishing challenge will be launched.

What do you all think?

Best regards and sorry for such a long post…

Greetings,

First of all, I share your enthusasim in how wonderful ocPortal is, and how much better it becomes with each and every new release. Being a bit of a trying out new things junkie, I still to this day visit opensourceCMS and take a look at the latests updates to their offerings there, trying out the demos, and such. Each time I leave with a smile because I have yet to find anything else offered there that is as great (for me and my needs) as ocPortal. I personally feel that nothing comes close. I also personally acknowledge that not everyone will share my feelings on this, no matter how loud I shout and how high I wave my banner, which is something I have done often. Just read those comments for ocPortal, and other places I have posted concerning ocPortal, and even my own site at legendsofnorova.com where I praise ocPortal and ocProducts staff. See that little banner under my user name here, that says ocPortal rocks? I didn't get that for nothing lol.

I also can see Eric's point. Reverting to fanboyism and posting your love of a product and giving it the highest review you can think of because you honestly love the product is one thing. Telling others that visit here that they should agree and follow your example is another.
I love using ocPortal, and when I see the opportunity to evangelize the wonders of this community & site creating masterpiece I do so, offering my own points and views on the subject and correcting misconceptions when need be. However I akcnowledge that shoving ocPortal down people's throats, bringing it up in every discussion for example, would hurt ocPortal more than help it.

For example, I love using linux. When I first started using linux I went around telling everyone that they need to go and use the superior OS and get rid of bloat and bug ridden (insert major popular commercial OS name here). Then I grew up and saw that such things actually turned people off from even trying linux. Why just the other day I saw someone in another forum telling a windows user to use ubuntu linux because it was the only true OS (which I disagree with btw lol) and that windows was crud, basically, giving the other person a hard time becaus ehe used windows, and it made me sick. So sick that I almost didn't want to use linux myself… almost.

The point is, I do not think that putting up a big flashy banner that says "Go vote for ocPortal, give em 5 stars" is the answer here.  Instead, we could offer that they could go vote if they want to, if the product suits their needs better than other products, as well as offer other ways of sharing your experiences and reviews of ocPortal, but I don't think it should be the main priority of the site. I know that I for one would hate to come here and see a big flashy banner telling me to vote (i did some time ago btw - 5 stars lol). It would actually make me not want to come back to this forum.

Though again, I must say I applaud your love of ocPortal. You are not alone in wanting it to be more accepted and others to try it out. However I also do not want everyone and their mother using ocPortal lol. I'd rather let those who just want a simple site use something like joomla, a simple blog use word press, and only those who have the time, determination, and desire to create a masterpiece of a website come in and use ocPortal. I'd hate to find around the web hundreds of abandoned ocPortal sites because it wasn't in the end what they wanted, needed, or did not have the desire and determination to understand. That, IMO, would do more to drive down ocPortal's worth and rank in the internet world, and cause more people to vote low for it, than anything.

Also, one last thing in my long ramble here. You gotta admit one thing, there's no way that a bunch of joomla and such fanboys will let ocPortal exceed in rank. They'll vote it down just to keep their beloved CMS more popular .

Greetings,

Mythus I'm really very glad you have joined this small discussion here. Sorry for replaying with such a delay but as I already mentioned in this thread before this is the busy pre-Christmas time.

The fundamental values we can easily accept here are those that You, Eric, me - only to mention just us talking here - we all share enthusiasm for ocPortal, we respect efforts applied to this system by its creators, we appreciate the power which is "given" by them for free into users hands and finally we all wish ocPortal to gain long deserved public recognition. The problem however doesn't disappear magically - we still do not know precisely how to pull out our favorite CMS from the niche where it actually remain at the moment.
 
Guys I am pretty aware that a lot of great things have been already done by you. That is why I highly appreciate all these banners "ocP ROCKS" which are visible evidence of your fantastic contribution to ocPortal phenomenon. Without all of you - "Honoured members" and "Community saints" and many, many others who can support odPortal just from time to time, without all of your steady involvement here, ocPortal could not count for a bright future now. But the problem for today is how to find a proper strategy for further development in marketing terms, or more precisly, what is the a proper language we should talk to other potential users of ocPortal.

Please believe me, this is not my intention to force people coming here to follow the path described by you as:

mythus said

reverting to fanboyism and posting your love of a product and giving it the highest review

No this is not my idea. At least not so simple (moreover I'm not a boy any more, as I'm 48 years old, so such an action in my case should be rather called "fanmanism", lol ). Beside my age let me also reveal one more thing from my cv. I spent some years in advertizing industry and I was taught there some basic skills. One of them was to always keep in mind to whom I want to sell …whatever I want to sell (product, idea, opinion etc) and to always choose the proper language if I want to communicate or better said if I want to be understood. And that is the crucial point in ocPortal situation now. The question is who are our potential clients (users, supporters, whatever…)? If we assume that today the web activities (commercial or opensource) are mainly created (powered, stimulated, built…) by the generation of people between 20 and 40 years old and the mainstream "fashion" in thinking and behavior here is set up by youngsters (already in corporation or in start-ups) and being aware that only "winning" their attention is a chance to ocPortal, we have to begin to talk to them in a style which is widely accepted and understood by them. At least we have to try to actively communicate our message. So I agree with you that this not a point to put up:

mythus said

a big flashy banner that says "Go vote for ocPortal, give em 5 stars

but I still think that making a decent banner (banners) linked to a specially prepared thread on our forums where all important for ocPortal review websites could be presented, and where everybody who wants to support our CMS can easily learn where to go to vote or/and comment, is not in my opinion a silly idea. Let me repeat please, it will at least show our guests that we as a community really care. But before we do this we have to know and agree what is our message and what is our main target group. This is really a turning point, as taking into consideration the complexity of ocPortal, its steeping learning curve, I can easily imagine that in different scenario our CMS should be "offered" rather to more mature, more demandable and even more professional, institutionalized users, like for example university communities. Have a look at the fantastic comment which appeared on OpensourceCMS just a few days ago. Chris Warburton wrote there:

I recently expanded the Web site of a University society I help to run, which had started to outgrow its previous static HTML + PHPBB setup. I decided on ocPortal, and it was very straightforward to install, even on the rather restricted hosting we have (for example it includes scripts for setting file permissions correctly). It integrates nicely with the existing PHPBB installation (existing user accounts work in ocPortal, staff permissions are used across ocPortal and PHPBB, the existing emoticons appear throughout ocPortal, etc.). We now have a calendar, galleries and a wiki system thanks to ocPortal (I disabled the other addons), along with other nice community features like the points system (this integrates well too, since every user started with a load of points due to their PHPBB activity over the years ).

Highly recommended!

Maybe this a better idea - to spread a word about ocPortal but not in the open public area but rather among more prestigious institutions which could value better tremendous possibilities of ocPortal. In such a case, our activity, our advert "campaigns", our language, should be definitely different.   

Of course I do realize that the crucial question who is ocPortal main target group remain a strategic issue of ocProduct team and I am deeply aware that first of all they are the guys who should and may decide about it.

However I'm convinced that in general (having all philosophical issues in brackets for a while) more active community has usually more chances to be "successful" at the end of the day. It worth to be mention for example, that since the day I posted here for the first time, the number of votes cast on OpensourceCMS increased a bit and it was enough to rise an overall score of ocPortal from 3.1 to 3.2 (results at the moment when I submitted this post).

It is nice for the beginning, isn't it.

I am very relaxed, Hobbis. I'm excited too that you are taking the initiative to ask others to spread the word of ocPortal.

It is only my own little humble opinion that someone should try something before giving it a 5 star rating… which I guess was an itch meant to be scratched.

There's a few other CMS' you mentioned that doesn't deserve my 4 star rating like I did ocPortal. I've basically had my chance to use almost all those and I must say that ocPortal does stand out above the rest.

Something I would recommend for ocProducts is to perhaps add their own ratings and testimonials perhaps on the downloads page.

We have a thread with banners created already by Allen (I think it was him). Those should be quickly more accessible without having to do a forums search. Then members can add those banners with a link to the downloads page directly where others can download, rate, and read testimonials right away and browse later and their own leisurely time.

I meant you no disrespect Hobbis in trying to get people over to OpensourceCMS. I just felt your comment about spreading the word to friends and family to head over there and rate a 5 (without them perhaps even knowing what their really voting for) was a bit silly… and you meant it as a joke… so all's well with that.

When I get time, I'll myself write a comment too over there stating why I rated it above average. Might have to wait until after the holidays.

Keep up the great work on getting ocPortal's name out there Hobbis!!

We're currently in the process of a small site refresh. I think we'll go over the comments on some of these review sites and get them on there. Part of the design refresh is injecting some more energy into our front page, which aligns with what's said here; I think you'll like it, it's quite cheeky and fun. I'll see if I can get a nice flash banner done by one of our designers.
Thanks all!
Chris

Chris Graham said

We're currently in the process of a small site refresh. I think we'll go over the comments on some of these review sites and get them on there. Part of the design refresh is injecting some more energy into our front page, which aligns with what's said here; I think you'll like it, it's quite cheeky and fun. I'll see if I can get a nice flash banner done by one of our designers.
Thanks all!
Chris

Chris this is a fantastic news, the best one I can expect now. Thank you Chris and thanks to all other Guys from ocProduct. I feel that something really good for ocPortal is going to happen very soon.  

By the way Chris, what do you think about my new ideas which are as follows:

1/ Thera are many newcomers here in the forums. They come to check out our CMS from different part of the world. Don't you think it could be very interesting and inspiring to ask them directly in what circumstances they discovered ocPortal or in other words how they find out that such CMS exists?

For us it could be absolutely crucial feedback, delivering perhaps some new ideas of potential channels of communication for OCP or even new solutions for further promotion. I think all it could work like that - in the forums should be established a special thread containing such an appeal for feedback from all newcomers (newly registered for example); each newcomer should be nicely welcomed and greeted via mail or private thread by one of active member of our community and asked to visit such a thread to share there her/his experience. What do you think?

2/Eric has shared with us (thanks Eric) an excellent proposition

Eric said

Something I would recommend for ocProducts is to perhaps add their own ratings and testimonials perhaps on the downloads page.

I think this is a very interesting solution to be implemented in our promotional activity, but
I would go a bit further. What do you think about setting up our own review website on the net where we could like "boxing champion" throw a glove against any other existing CMS, proving our superiority. Of course the whole project must have been prepared in details, because it should be organized in clearly different than usual way (voting plus commenting). The problem which I experienced painfully recently was that it happened very often to me that owners of such review websites were biased and frequently showed lack of professionallism and objectivity. Often they decide upfront and arbitrary which CMS will be presented and which doesn't. Unfortunately I have recently collected a number of proofs of such bad behavior. Our own website could give us a chance to keep right level of professionalism and fairness. So, what do you think Chris? Am I crazy,lol?

Best regards and thanks again for such a great news.

Cheers  

     

Just my personal opinion…

To be honest I don't see a lot of value in '1' as it kind of seems like preaching to the converted. I think only a minority of people research CMS's nowadays and the majority go with what they've heard of already. I was actually just looking at our traffic stats, and our hits from hotscripts have gone down quite a lot over time. I think this is part of a trend – the market has matured to a point where brands are now strong enough for people to be attracted without research.

Personally I'm trying to focus on what people need in a CMS and can't get at the moment, product strategy. People currently usually go with a simple CMS that they put a lot of time in to rework into what they want. To me the goal is making everything ocPortal gives out of the box not just a bit more appealing than this, but massively undermining. We have the features, but things need to be clearly intuitive, minimal for what people need, easy to manipulate, etc. 5.1 beta2 is going to take another big step in that direction (a lot of progress has happened since beta1 but we just haven't announced it yet; there are some clues on the tracker though).

Getting such a shallower learning curve then goes together with a strategy of taking on other CMS's directly on a more even footing. Being able to introduce people who we know are having problems with something else and it being as straight forward to switch as possible has got to be good.
I don't believe our learning curve is currently worse than anything comparable (they're all steep except for simple sites), but that's not the point – it has to be considerably better to get noticed.

One example of a marketing strategy I like is to answer people's questions about other CMS's (on e.g. Twitter) with very quick Jing video tutorials on how to implement it in ocPortal. I think that kind of head-on approach is a nice one, and done in a public forum like that gives it buzz. This in addition to continuing to court media coverage of whatever kind.

Regarding '2' (testimonials), I'm not sure I see the benefit again – we have lots, more than people would read. I don't think most people read this stuff (in fact, I think only a minority even visit the big established sites like cmsmatrix), except maybe a few lines. I'm in favour of simplifying things as much as possible, making the process as streamlined as possible. I just did an Alexa check that confirms my theory (more than I thought actually!) - drupal.org has 100x more reach than cmsmatrix.org.

I like the idea of using platforms like Twitter for finding people's real-life issues with their CMS choice. The number of people who file bugs and ask for help is certainly less than the number of people who rant to Twitter then either hack together workarounds or give up Would be important not to come across as spamming though!

Speaking of which, that OpenSourceCMS review was from me; but I made sure to write from the point of view of the Web Master for the Sheffield University Free Software Society, rather than an ocProducts astroturfer (the PHPBB integration really did impress me a lot!).

The main reason I wrote this though, was since review/feedback mechanisms have been mentioned. I have to say that the best feedback system I've seen is on Google's help pages. They show, at the bottom, the question "Was this useful to you?" with yes and no radio buttons. If you click either then some more questions appear, answering those shows some more, and so on. Having something this unobtrusive and low-effort is what makes it appealing. I'm sure they've got a lot more information from users only answering the first question than they would from presenting a free-for-all comments box, simply from the number of responses they get by making it so quick and un-intimidating.

Some possible uses for this kind of 1-click feedback I can think of are "is this useful?" questions for each help/tutorial page, or for each section on a page; a 'like'/'favourite'/'star' button by each section on the Features page (to see which features are the most heavily used, and which are ocPortal's main 'selling points') and a way to quickly say 'me too' on the bug & feature tracker, to see what features are heavily anticipated (would be useful to prioritise bugs too, but Chris seems to squash them too quickly for there to be a backlog ). I think this would get a lot more data from less 'hardcore' users, who don't want to go out of their way to write some prose in a text box.

In the past we had commenting on all the tutorials, but very few people entered feedback and lots of people tried to use it as a support channel. I bet Google get the same but just ignore all the questions that come through.

Attachment

» Download: Flash_banner(468x60)_dec28.zip (36 Kb, 170 downloads so far)

Good one!

 

Nice!

I put the new ocPortal Flash Banner on my site and I thought it would be a click and it takes you to ocPortal's home page but it doesn't.

In EDIT BANNERS I indicated the ocPortal address as a destination URL but it doesn't seem to make it a hot link back to ocP.

Any suggestions?

Whoops. We'll get that fixed, I think it needs to be built into the banner itself and I forgot about it.

right! OK be waiting for it...

Forgot to post this, sorry for the delay.

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» Download: ad-banner.swf.zip (48 Kb, 201 downloads so far)

Chris Graham said

Forgot to post this, sorry for the delay.

Thanks Chris, works great!