You find a new project...open source or not...is it the current state of the project code....the documentation describing the goals...marketing plan, what?
When entering a saturated market, does it make sense to provide comparison tables, hilighting why product ABC is better than XYZ?
The few projects started on here, typically gained traction by being discussed here for a couple days first. Good idea or bad? I think they failed due to lack of leadership, certainly not motivation or talent.
What motivates you
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alex.barylski
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Re: What motivates you
What motivates me most is solving a "problem" I experience myself. Scratch your own itch as they say. And I think that might be the case for many people. Just look at many open source projects. Most of them start because someone is not happy with what is currently available.

However, I do think that that leadership doesn't have to be one person. A small group of people, interacting well, should be able to take the lead as well.
If you want to "sell" your project, I think the answer is definitely yes. It's one of the first and important questions anyone looking around will ask "how is this different/better then .."PCSpectra wrote:When entering a saturated market, does it make sense to provide comparison tables, highlighting why product ABC is better than XYZ?
Agreed. If nobody takes the lead, all the followers have nowhere to go. It's the same as in any other social/group situation. Maybe it's something biological/evolutionary. That most of us are looking at the leader of the pack to see what to doPCSpectra wrote:The few projects started on here, typically gained traction by being discussed here for a couple days first. Good idea or bad? I think they failed due to lack of leadership, certainly not motivation or talent.
However, I do think that that leadership doesn't have to be one person. A small group of people, interacting well, should be able to take the lead as well.
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alex.barylski
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Re: What motivates you
That is exactly why there are so many CMS out there. Joomla and Drupal both have thier pro/con but honestly they beat most everything else out there from a developer standpoint. The code is well implemented, documented, etc. Joomla follows more best practices, at least in the sense it uses design patterns and objects, whereas Drupal is entirly procedural (from what I've seen). WordPress is like a light weight version of Drupal with it's extension mechanism using hooks as opposed to a more OO inheritence approach. It's interesting because Drupal allows you to use an existing module, and extend only what you need, whereas Joomla (from my experience) requires you to either:Scratch your own itch as they say. And I think that might be the case for many people. Just look at many open source projects. Most of them start because someone is not happy with what is currently available.
1. Inherit and override
2. Replace completely by copying the existing modules and hacking in your features
The Drupal approach in this regard is much more expediant and best overall in design as no hacking is required per se. Of course this kind of extension can only take you so far until you need to start from scratch, and Drupals module architecture is nothing what it should be. There is no sight of MVC (unless you really try hard and see it -- but from a framework perspective it's non-existant) and implementing anything more complex than a hellow world feels incredibly hackish, awkward and blah. Joomla does promote MVC so it's no wonder it's components/modules are often sold as mini-applications.
Not sure why I'm brain dumping like this, I just found both systems equally fascinating and annoying. Ideally a CMS would be built to facilitate both a hook extension system and component architecture.
The design of such applications would resemble the development of advanced Windows applications almost exactly.
Drupal lets you do things similar to Windows extensions. You know how when you install a program like Norton or some Backup utility and it installs an shell extension that adds a custom checkbox to the standard "Save As" dialog box so when saving a file in your favourite program, like Word or Excel, you could optionally let the back up utility to tag that files as worthy of backup, thus saving the user of having to find the file in the backup util? Drupal hooks work in a very similar way, whereas, when you building a custom component in MFC you build it from scratch, hopefully following MVC. Joomla works much more like that approach to solving the problem. Both neat, but even better when coupled togather to form the over all system.
Anyway, again sorry for the brain dump, it's just whats on my mind right now and I feel like talking
Cheers,
Alex
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JeroneReyes
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Re: What motivates you
Thanks for this thread.
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alex.barylski
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Re: What motivates you
Why? Are you feeling motivated?
Cheers,
Alex
Cheers,
Alex
- flying_circus
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Re: What motivates you
That and/or the payday, usuallymatthijs wrote:What motivates me most is solving a "problem" I experience myself.