Adam Howitt's Blog

Feb 09
2007

Team Fusebox needs you

Last week at the Frameworks Conference I joined Team Fusebox to help share some of the load.  At the meeting, the member of Team Fusebox picked an area of responsibility so I jumped in to lead the marketing team.  My role is not just to do the marketing but to find volunteers interested in becoming part of a marketing team dedicated to finding the best ways to market Fusebox. 

I've worked extensively with Google Analytics to help our clients understand what is happening on their website and whether they are getting any value for the $3000 pay per click campaigns they host.  We signed up for a Google Analytics account now to help us make decisions by the numbers and try some new ideas but the key is that we have a baseline before the marketing team kicks into high gear.

One of my goals for the team is to dig in to understand what gave Model Glue and Rails such traction in such a short amount of time.  I understand that there are technical differences but I believe that a good deal of the success was gained through smart marketing.

I use Fusebox 2, 3 and 4 every day at Duo Consulting and we have some high profile sites running in various flavors of our Fusebox based CMS.  What we've found is that not only is it stable and capable but it delivers under significant load.  Training new developers the coding standard becomes much easier when everyone knows where to look to find the queries or the form submission pages.  Maintaining over 100 fusebox applications is easier as a result of this standard approach.

So what about you?  Do you use Fusebox?  Have you tried the other frameworks, and if so why?  What was it about Model Glue that caught your interest?  Where did you find out about it and what made it easy for you to get started?  If you are interested in joining the marketing team to look into these kind of questions and have an interest in helping drive Fusebox forward, please let me know and I'll get you added to the mailing list.  If you would rather email me to join, send something to adamhowitt@gmail.com with Fusebox in the subject line.  I'm looking for people not only who know what questions to ask and who to ask but also people who are creative thinkers who can generate ideas for promoting the site.

Lastly, if you didn't see Sandy Clark's post, we have a contest to win two free passes to CFObjective and one pass to CFUnited.  To win we are looking for a redesign of the Fusebox site.  Full details can be found over at the Fusebox Wiki. We're really excited that Jared Rypka-Hauer and Michael Smith of Teratech offered these prizes - this should get some really good entries flooding in.

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  1. I've got a few ideas as to why Rails took off in such a short amount of time.

    1. 37Signals created it while building a wildly popular web-base app, Basecamp.

    2. They (37S) use their blog as a VERY very good marketing tool and had quite a large readership prior to the launch of Basecamp.

    3. Rails has Protoype and Scriptaculous "built-in" so its crazy easy to add in the neat-o ajax updates and web 2.0 effects. This may seem like not such a big deal to people who are used to dealing with back-end code, but how your app looks and functions *is* marketing.

    4. Related to the latter point above, and maybe this is just my perception, but it seems that Rails developers actually give a crap as to what their apps look like. http://www.rubyonrails.com/applications

    I could go on, but its late and its Friday...

  2. I have been using FuseBox since 1.0 saw the FuseBox council come and go and the biggest killer mistake in all of that time was to discontinue the email list. Moving to a forum was a large mistake in my opinion it stifled a great community.

  3. Hey Mike & Jeff, Thanks for the feedback. Mike - have you been back to the mailing list since they were re-introduced? If you haven't seen them, you can sign up on the fusebox.org page on the right hand side. Jeff - That's a great point about the 37 signals application and the pre-packaged libraries.

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