Hello everyone,
Now that SpreadCocoon (http://www.spreadcocoon.com) has been running for a month or so, I want to talk with the list about how we/I can make the site better and more useful to the Cocoon community.
I've added an events calendar (http://www.spreadcocoon.com/event), which all registered users are welcome to post to. If you are staging a meeting, stammtisch or whatever this may be a good alternative to the wiki (where events stay visible long after they have passed in time). At the moment I'm trawling the wiki and people's blogs looking for notices of conferences, meetings etc.; please feel free to added your events to this calendar too!
What I'd like to see evolve in SpreadCocoon:
* Enhancements to the skin, to make it more Cocoon branded. What are people's thoughts about the degree to which Cocoon is a distinctive brand?
* Community use of the community events calendar: promoting the GetTogether alongside the cocoongt site.
* More "Cocoon in the wild" sites, with more input from the creators as to how Cocoon helped them achieve their goals.
* Activity counters showing download statistics and mailing list activity.
* Answers to the question "What is Cocoon?" with pointers to flagship products built on Cocoon.
Any comments? Any other ideas?
Probably the #1 FAQ is "Why is SpreadCocoon powered by Drupal (i.e. not Cocoon)?" (http://drupal.org). I see now that the Spring site is powered by Drupal (http://www.springframework.org/), and it seems that JavaLobby are looking at Drupal too (but calling for Java alternatives - see http://www.javalobby.org/nl/archive/jlnews_20050405o.html). Someone said to me offline, "I think Drupal is a nice fit there, with its 'leaky abstractions everywhere'" and I'd tend to agree. What do others think?
Steven, it occurs to me that Drupal may be well suited to the CocoonGT site. Drupal offers ecommerce modules (Worldpay, Paypal, invoicing etc.) and plenty of people have used Drupal for exactly this kind of purpose (see http://drupal.org/node/5931). I'd be more than willing to build such a site.
Best regards, Mark
