[Phoenix-pm] Kickstarter to hone a popular Perl enterprise CMS into a WordPress competitor

[Scott Walters]

Hi Phoenix.PM,

At YAPC about a week ago, during Lightning Talks, I announced a
project to rework a popular enterprise (crazy numbers of high end
features, large companies and governments use it, but too hard to use
for small companies and church groups and such) to compete more
directly against WordPress.

Perl needs end user applications and a CMS in particular to draw in
new developers.  Things written in Perl create relevance for Perl.
Application frameworks are important, but most new sites are created
using WordPress.  A CMS gives you user accounts, messaging, password
recovery, group permissions, moderation, and a host of other features
from the start, and then offers APIs and marketplaces for extending it
into different types of sites.

This particular system is little known inside the Perl community but
is popular in the real world (google "content management system
comparison site").  It had its own conference that drew hundreds of
people each year:

http://www.plainblack.com/uploads/9P/mi/9PmiI41MERx7H9WQrqIJkQ/DSC00103.JPG

The code was GPL'd.  It has a fiercely loyal user base that swears
that it's better architected and nicer to code on than any competing
system.  And it's written in Perl.

The Perl community has traditionally been apathetic about applications
written in Perl, but I want to change that.  I wouldn't be here today
if JaWS at UMN wasn't working on the WebCT online course system, and
Motorola didn't have hundreds of internal users running faq-o-matic,
awstats, and dozens of other things written in Perl.  PHP had a huge
win in proudly advertising things written in their language.  No code
will ever be "good enough", but we need to create symbiotic
relationships with Perl apps anyway.

So, please pledge generously to my Kickstarter:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2083389021/create-perl-competition-to-the-php-content-managem

I'm posting background and factoids and thank yous to my Twitter
stream too:  http://twitter.com/scrottie.

Cheers,
-scott