Appealing to market segments

[Owen Winkler]

It's been a long time thought of mine that Habari could more
successfully gain popularity not as a general-purpose blogging tool, but
as a tool to implement web sites for specific market segments.

Reading this article this morning reminded me of this:
http://greghoy.com/restauranteurs-are-smarter-than-this-arent-th

It seems to me that if we were able to package kind of "canned"
solutions on top of Habari for implementing a working web site, we could
enter the market as a go-to tool in those industries.

Here are a few of places where I think Habari could excel by providing
packaged site solutions:

* Restaurants
* Real Estate
* Club/Organization
* Anything "brochure"-like

It would be fantastic to offer Habari as an alternative, complete tool
to people who would otherwise throw up a single-page brochure site.
What additional features the site could offer as part of such a package
could be discussed.

What functionality would we need to add to have the best ease of use for
people attempting to implement such a solution? How would it be
deployed? Would you select a specific distribution from the Habari home
page, or would you choose a package implementation from a menu during
the installer? How could this work?

Owen

[mikelietz]

I've long thought Habari could make a better ComicPress (http://
www.comicpress.org/) with a few additional plugins.

I would think an approach like what NetBeans does would be suitable -
you pick the configured bundle at download, but presumably later can
add/subtract functionality.

For specific needs, without examining existing platforms, here's what
I'd think might be useful for Real Estate:
* Bulk photo upload/crop/rotate/retouch (doesn't need to be fancy, but
*must* be easy to use)
* One click update/delete outside of admin (not edit in the publish
page, but inline editing on the themed output)
* Mapping with the ability to add/remove multiple locations
* Comparisons of postinfo - compare features side by side for two or
more listings

Not sure about the others yet, and I can't recall my ideas of
similarly focused themes/bundles that Habari would be great for.
Certainly there are many more.

mikelietz

[mikelietz]

> I would think an approach like what NetBeans does would be suitable -

To be clearer, I mean to say you would pick your 'flavor' of Habari
before downloading it. That way the installer doesn't worry the
ordinary users with the 'commercial' stuff - options they'd not need
to see or choose. You want the real estate edition/bundle, you pick it
from the site (or add the plugins later yourself).

Also, to illustrate another possible one of these, check out any
project on kickstarter.com. They have a front page with a video and
some information, and then a linked blog. With some different styling,
this could easily be a trailer or two and a production diary for a
movie.

mikelietz

[luke]

It's interesting that this has come up from somebody else. We've been
doing this kind of thing for a little while now, with varying degrees
of success. The things that we've produced have needed varying amounts
of work with habari, but for the most part, we've been able to keep /
system intact. For an example of the most extreme modification, see
airbrushhub.com. It's a full on user upload images + videos do-daddy.

In terms of the idea itself, i like the idea of have some pre-packaged
configurations of habari that people could start from. In my
experience, sites often come in 3 or so 'sizes':

* 1 page info site (i don't think habari can do this better than html)
* 3-5 page extended info site
* 3-5 + blog
* 3-5 + other dynamic info.

So the 3-5 is kinda taken care of by 'pages' at the moment, but there
maybe other bits in there to help site creators.

I think one of the main areas we'll need to improve is the handling of
media. The image tray is, well, nice, but imho way too complicated at
the moment for a non-technical user to use. Maybe they aren't the
target market for this feature? Anyway, building in some basic crop/
rotate/retouch as mikelietz suggests maybe a way forward with that
one.

Just my 2¢.

Cheers!

[Owen Winkler]

On 6/11/2010 7:35 PM, mikelietz wrote:
> I've long thought Habari could make a better ComicPress (http://
> www.comicpress.org/) with a few additional plugins.

Yes! ComicPress would be an ideal implementation of this thought.

Owen

[Matt Read]

On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 7:35 PM, mikelietz <cod...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've long thought Habari could make a better ComicPress (http://
> www.comicpress.org/) with a few additional plugins.
>
> I would think an approach like what NetBeans does would be suitable -
> you pick the configured bundle at download, but presumably later can
> add/subtract functionality.

I've thought about this before. My idea was to have "installer"
packages; So you could just add your included plugins/themes/install
scripts to a folder (3rdparty would prolly be good for this). Habari's
Installer would look for these install scripts and load/execute as
necessary. But the current installer would have to be "pluggable" for
the installer scripts to run well.

This would make it very easy for people to distribute "pre-packaged"
habari installs. simply add a folder to the vanilla habari install,
and habari does the rest.

--
Matt Read
http://mattread.info
http://mattread.com

[Matt Read]

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 4:46 PM, Matt Read <ma...@mattread.com> wrote:
> This would make it very easy for people to distribute "pre-packaged"
> habari installs. simply add a folder to the vanilla habari install,
> and habari does the rest.

that should read, "simply add a folder to the vanilla habari
_distribution_, and habari does the rest."

[chrisjdavis]

This is what I have been trying to prove/express with some of my
recent projects (Tracker/Tim/etc).

I think we are well on the way to having a platform that can be molded
into anything we want. We just need to go after it.

On Jun 15, 1:47 pm, Matt Read <m...@mattread.com> wrote:

[Arthus Erea]

I 100% agree with Chris. So far, I've built everything from a task manager to a store using Habari. Despite all the great frameworks out there, it remains my go-to platform for any new project. It always performs excellently using just a few content-type plugins and zero modification of /system.

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