Impackt 08 — Interview with Scott Goodwin

Scott Goodwin is the President of The Open Source Collective, Inc. He received a B.S. degree in Management Information Systems and an M.B.A from the University of Southern Mississippi. In the mid-nineties he co-founded what would become a multi-million dollar ecommerce company then sold his interest in 2000. For the last 4 years Scott has been actively involved in the open source community running the varies entities under The Open Source Collective, Inc. including OpenSourceHost.com, and opensourceCMS.com among others.

Packt: On opensourceCMS.com, there are about 9 different categories of Content Management Systems including Portals, Blogs, e-Commerce, etc. Which of these categories saw the most new entrants in 2007?  Are you anticipating any major development/change in any categories in 2008?

Scott Goodwin: To be honest, entrants into all categories at opensourceCMS.com have plateaued.  There seems to be a saturation, whereby truly new entrants are relatively rare.  We do still add new systems, and there are many in the queue for installation, but the avalanche of requests have subsided. I would like to see more open source ecommerce systems.  There aren't many of these systems from which to choose.  The ones available, such as zen cart (a fork of osCommerce), are very good, but competition is helps everyone.  Most ecommerce systems are commercial, and that makes sense too.

Packt: We recently awarded MODx with the Most Promising Open Source CMS Award. While newer CMS's have the advantage of learning from their predecessors and mimicking existing CMS's features, it is quite difficult to penetrate the market already dominated by some very popular systems. What do you think newer Web Content Management Systems like these can do to compete with the established ones?

SG: Constantly innovate.  That is the key to longevity for everything in life.  It is difficult to compete, and to be honest, once someone chooses a system they are very reluctant to change.  The process to convert a user to a new CMS is never easy, and is fraught with potential compatibility problems for the user.  You need to capture users up front, rather than try to convert them down the road.  I would make sure the presentation of the CMS is appealing as that is the very first thing they notice.  If the first thing they see is not pleasing to the eye they'll move on without even testing it.  Documentation is so very important, and the absolute least amount of fun to deal with.  The better documented your system, the easier it is for people to pick it up and use it.  If your system has no, or very limited docs, that is a big problem.  Be innovative, and do things like create create flash tutorials.  Make it as easy as possible for people to get up and running with your CMS.  Word of mouth spreads like wildfire in this market.  You need something to differentiate yourself from everyone else.  There are so many choices out there, in order to rise to the top you really have to have something special to offer.

Packt: Since its inception, opensourceCMS.com has grown quite large; it is possible to test about 160 CMS's now! Would you like to share some highlights of this journey and your plans for 2008?

SG: It has grown tremendously, and sometimes feels a little unwieldy at times.  It's not done growing either, which is the scary part.  It's very time consuming trying to keep all these systems updated, and working correctly.  There is a lot that goes on behind the scenes to make things run as smoothly as possible.  It's been challenging and fun.  I never thought we'd have this many demos.  I'd like to thank Chahn Ong, who has been with opensourceCMS.com many years, and has contributed such things as the demo countdown clock, and the demo comments script.  I'd also like to thank Zach Taylor as well.  Without these two there would be no opensourceCMS.com. Sometime in 2008 we will begin offering what I call Demo-on-Demand.  For a nominal fee you will be able to choose multiple systems, install modules, 3rd party add ons, etc. onto those systems and test your creations privately.  This way you can decide if one system, with different modules, will do what you want before you begin investing your time setting up a system only to find it doesn't do what you want.  Also, with so many people testing different systems as the administrator, it can become difficult playing with a demo as each administrator is doing different things at the same time.  If you want your own private demos, demo-on-demand will allow that.

Packt: Thanks Scott.

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