How to increase active installs of XWiki?

Help / Discuss
#35

I really miss snap-like variant, and considering to invest in this direction. But without commitments yet.

Hope that I can manage it. But can’t even estimate complexity yet. Looks like to settle another build environment and adapt with new releases.
Does somebody aware of typical problems?

#36

Would be awesome. I can certainly help answer XWiki setup questions. I’m maintaining the official XWiki Docker images.

Thanks

#37

My suggestion (I have not seen above) is to promote myxwiki / community hosting and make it really work :innocent:.

By hosting more “litle” wikis, “readers” can discover this marvelous tool and “content editor” can test its power without (the technical pain of) installation.

What do you think?

#38

Take 1 (user hat):

  • I agree it would be very nice!

Take 2 (xwiki dev hat):

  • The goal of myxwiki.org is not to be a free community hosting platform. It’s a test platform for xwiki development and it’s a best effort with the manpower that there is. The reason is that it’s very very costly to do a free hosting platform that runs well (see take 3 below). Unfortunately, I’ve not seen many contributors/users of myxwiki.org help out diagnose/debug problems and where needed, provide patches to fix them. So +1 to do what you want but other people need to work on it, not the xwiki devs who are already more than swamped in developing xwiki.

Take 3 (xwiki sas CTO hat)

  • FTR XWiki SAS tried that (free professional xwiki hosting farm) in the past and it requires a lot of effort and money. So much that XWiki SAS developed XWiki Cloud for that (it took more than 2 years with 2 full time engineers to implement it properly and I’m not even counting the hosting and infra costs here). And it’s priced very reasonably IMO (10 euros per month for 10 users, that’s 120 euros per year, it’s very cheap for a professional hosting, including support). So IMO users who want to help out the XWiki project and who want a nice/stable wiki should either contribute code or take some hosting on XWiki Cloud. Note that all the money earned this way is fully reinvested in the development of XWiki. See https://myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome#HWhat27sthedifferencewithXWikiSASCloud3F (it’s even free for open source projects btw ;)).

Technical aspect: FTR the only way to guarantee stability for a XWiki farm ATM is to have one instance of XWiki per “wiki” instead of one instance for all wikis (this is what XWiki Cloud does). Since a single wiki can use a lot of CPU or memory and make all the other wikis not accessible at any time. There’s no way in Java to provide guaranteed memory/CPU to tenants. It also makes it very hard to upgrade the farm without breaking people (since XWiki is highly customizable and you can break wikis when upgrading).

WDYT?

#39

@xrichard Another way of saying what I mentioned above, is that your idea to increase active installs is already implemented, but with XWiki Cloud (which is both cheap and free for open source projects). But it’s the chicken and egg issue, it’s not because it exists that people find it and use it :slight_smile: For that you need something else: virality, marketing, etc (see the other ideas at https://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Drafts/IncreasingActiveInstalls/).

The important part in your idea IMO is the “promote” one. How to do that?

#40

@vmassol

Thanks for your answers and to share your thoughts.

Sorry but I’m not comfortable (like you are!) to exchange ideas using a written forum :yum:.

Some personal “key” ideas:

My point of view is: instead of promoting again XWiki to “tech / geeks / developpers …” which is already done as far as it can be; my suggestion is to try to touch an other audience like persons or little groups who are seeking to “spread / share” content they produced by themselves.

Larger use of myxwiki.org (even if it’s more a “test” platform than a “free hosting” solution :smiley:) can help in 2 ways:

  1. In some case the hosted content can be partially public and can be discovered (with the help of web search engine like Google) and if these “public” users both find the content and the tool convenient … they should, at their turn, create their own wiki => increasing active installs :heart_eyes:.
  2. When authors of a Wiki hosted on myxwiki.org will have reached myxwiki limits (in stability or datas storage volume or what ever …) they should consider having their “own wiki” either with xwiki cloud offering or with on-premise install => increasing active installs (bis) :heart_eyes:.

I know it sounds like a looong process to promote xwiki with “public samples” of working wikis but I think it’s worth it.

PS: thanks for your work (with Thomas) on myxwiki.org (it’s up again now) ; your explanations on it’s real nature (more a test platform) and your transparency about the technical issues raised by this farm (current xwiki architecture is not yet able to perfectly handled farm).

PS2: I personally consider myself as just an “advanced myxwiki user” and my personal contribution is limited to the following: translation, bug reports, improvements … I think you can not expect more collaboration from any active “myxwiki” user like me :innocent:.

Emojis not rendered in some posts
#41

One idea to “promote” XWiki might be to increase visibility through other software vendors and/or projects for which integrations exist.

For example XWiki provides an OnlyOffice connector and so is also mentioned on the OnlyOffice page, but not very prominently. Maybe some closer collaboration or cooperation between OnlyOffice and XWiki SAS could be possible to improve XWiki visibility on their site.

The same could work for other existing or future integrations - let yourself be mentioned on the pages of other popular software, so XWiki can be found.

Also maybe try to get your packages included in popular Linux distributions - I found many software this way, just by browsing and searching my distributions’s package index.

Not sure how well all this will work, and some of t his may cost quite a bit of effort, but it’s just a few ideas from the top of my head…

#42

Definitely a good idea.

I had the exact same comment for XWiki SAS. What I was told was that XWiki SAS had explored it already and the reason that some integrations are more highlighted than others on the OnlyOffice web site is because they are done by the OnlyOffice team themselves and they “sell” it. XWiki is in the connectors area with others external connectors: https://www.onlyoffice.com//fr/connectors.aspx . cc @SilviaMacovei about this since she’s in charge of paying apps at XWiki SAS and thus the OnlyOffice extension.

Yes, a good idea. Do you have specific sites where you think we could be listed?

Also a good idea but not easy to implement. See https://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Drafts/IncreasingActiveInstalls/ where it’s listed as “Have XWiki bundled in some distributions (e.g. linux distributions)”. The hard part is getting started and knowing where XWiki could be added. If you have ideas, that would be great! @tmortagne suggested “Provide an XWiki package on the Snap Store (an app store for Linux supported by more and more distributions and the list is already impressive)”.

Keep them coming! The more specific the ideas, the more they can be put in action :slight_smile:

Thanks

#43

Another idea:

You’re sales team probably already uses online advertising like Google Adwords and similar. If not however, this might be worth a shot. :wink:

Another idea may be to put up articles which mention XWiki in relation to other products and try to get them ranked high in search engines. I’m most definitely NOT talking about search engine spam, which is a red sign for me to stay as far away from the products advertised there as I can, but actual fair and insightful articles.

For example, I found XWiki when googling for “Confluence open source alternative”, where a comparative article from XWiki SAS is already ranked quite well. Maybe this could be extended with comparisons to other popular Wiki systems and competitors.

Concerning adding packages to Linux distributions, Snap is probably a good idea, even though I seem to be getting old-school and have not yet tried this “modern” stuff. :wink: I still see a risk of missing important security updates if every software bundles all stuff, somethink which at least with Docker images seems to be getting a real issue, but that’s totally unrelated to XWiki and thus doesn’t belong here. :wink:

You already have Debian packages, so maybe you could give it a try to make them “official” Debian packages. Downside is that Debian’s release cycles are quite lengthy, so this may require you to support pretty ancient versions of XWiki - at least with security updates. You could still nudge all users ending up in your forums with questions concerning the old versions in Debian to upgrade to a later release with your own official repo, which needs to provide an upgrade path for the official Debian packages, though.

In any case, with XWiki being included in Debian, chances are that it will also end up in Ubuntu quickly, at least in Universe / Multiverse.

Fedory / RHEL packages might also be an idea, as it’s the second “big” Linux ecosystem.

Regards,

Gunter

#44

Well it’s exactly my case too actually but I see it proposed more and more in other projects when I want to install them. Native packages still are my reflex but maybe I’m just old and the good thing about snap is that it’s one package that (supposedly) works pretty much in all distributions.

#45

There is a big constraint for it: all external dependencies of XWiki (a looot) must have their own package also in the official repository and Debian (and Linux distributions in general) contains very very few Java libraries packages unfortunately…

#46

Hi,

Indeed, XWiki SAS has a partnership with OnlyOffice since last year. Their official technology partners are listed on the page you indicated. The XWiki SAS marketing team collaborates with OnlyOffice periodically to produce new content concerning this collaboration and we hope that it will be even more visible this year :slight_smile:

Silvia

#47

Hi,

It’s a good point! Indeed, the XWiki SAS sales and marketing team use Google Ads and other similar advertising platforms to complement marketing efforts.

Thanks a lot for all the good ideas! I’ll make sure the marketing team at XWiki SAS also have a look. Lots of interesting suggestions.

#48

Not sure it was mentioned already, but what about making it possible to order servers preinstalled with XWiki from hosting providers such as OVH. OVH proposes to deliver servers preinstalled with Drupal, Joomla, WordPress or Prestashop already. That’d be great imho to be able to get a server preinstalled with XWiki and fine tuned for it. This would not include the automated updates obviously, but that could make XWiki more well known, what do you think? Unless it’s the other way round and the hosting providers accept to preinstall servers only once the installation count is above a given treshold already…

#49

There’s also a path of growth in making XWiki more well known as a platform for developers. I was surprised to see that Django – awesome framework as well – has 100x more stars than XWiki on GitHub: nearly 45000 Django stars, less than 500 XWiki stars at the time of writing. As discussed with @vmassol recently, we could start with renewing the architecture and development XWiki documentation pages and compare each XWiki service with other major development frameworks along specific axis. I’ll try to propose a draft along this line on dev.xwiki.org.

#50

I’ve created a draft that reuses information already available on more specialized pages related to each listed module. The goal is 1) to present the XWiki platform in a way that can be easily compared, service by service, with other frameworks, 2) to be possibly an entry point to be added to the Wikipedia page about existing large web frameworks.

  • Do you think such a page would be useful? (it’s a work in progress)
  • Would it make sense to create an XWiki class for attaching XWiki objects to each “top level” XWiki module so that such a page could be generated from the existing documentation pages?
#51

Sure. The only question is the cost of developing and maintaining it. FTR there are several cloud providers supporting XWiki already in this way (I remember https://docs.jelastic.com/jelastic-xwiki-deploy but there are more - we should list them somewhere on xwiki.org). Of course, the more the merrier. The question is: who does the work and supports it. It takes a lot of time to support properly a new packaging (cf the docker one for example).

#52

This was started at https://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Drafts/XWikiHosting

#53

Regarding OVH, a key question imho would be to know what packaging they expect, possibly the existing XWiki Debian packages are enough?

#54

I’m having trouble with documentation abit.


What does this mean “You only have to run this command to install all the interesting components.”?