Hello, on 02/17/2010 01:06 AM Paul M Foster said the following: > I've given Manuel a hard time in the past about his site design. But > we'll see what his new design is, when it shows up. Actually, there was a contest and the users have chosen the winning design, not me. That was the way to assure the majority of the users that care would be satisfied. The winning designing is viewable here but since the author is still making some changes to fix some issues on pages that were not tested during the contest, it may not be viewable all the times. http://www.phpclasses.org/design/turn/2/theme/igd01.html If you cannot see it yet, the author left a preview on their site: http://www.intergraphicdesigns.com/clients/phpclasses/ > As for Manuel profiting from the whole thing, I don't see another > busines model working. Source Forge has a similar business model. And > nearly every other Linux publication "profits" from the work of FOSS > developers. The only other popular business model on the FOSS world is a > support-based model, which works for companies with a single product or > a small stable of products. It wouldn't work for phpclasses.org. Right, because the site just distributes other people's code, not support it directly. > Having to register to download classes from phpclasses.org is a > nuisance. Manuel says this is up to the individual developer. This may > be technically true, but Manuel *offers* this as an option. Contrast > Source Forge, which performs a similar function but does not require any > registration to download anything. I imagine that the registration > allows Manuel to tightly monitor site usage in a variety of ways. Actually it is much more than that. If you download a package, the site keeps track of that and next time the package is updated, it send you an e-mail alert so you can get the latest version, unless you do not want to be notified of course. Also the site counts how many distinct users downloaded each package and builds top download rankings . If you download a package more than once, it only counts once, so the top download charts are accurate, making it fair for everybody. For users this may not be very important, but for authors it is very motivating. Authors are happy that the site lets their users know about updates of their classes. Authors also like to see the progress of their packages in terms of users that have downloaded it. The site also provide a blog for each package, so when the author wants to post something new about the class or ask for feedback, a message is sent to the users that downloaded the package. There are other compelling reasons but this is basically why more than 2600 authors submitted over 5000 packages. The site gets them attention. Other sites like Sourceforge cannot provide this level of attention precisely because they do not require users to download even if the authors wanted that. -- Regards, Manuel Lemos Find and post PHP jobs http://www.phpclasses.org/jobs/ PHP Classes - Free ready to use OOP components written in PHP http://www.phpclasses.org/ -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
