Hiya guys ,

My name is Patrick Tipping and I am a member of the Launchr community. When I say member, I actually mean trained monkey who tries to get into contact with people .

I recently tried to contact you via your contact form, but I never received a response, so I'm gonna try using this forum instead .

Anyway, I would like to introduce you to Launchr with the hope of raising your interest in participating in our community program.

In short, Launchr was created to offer an easy way of testing, demonstrating and evaluating open source web applications.

This can be especially interesting for community projects like yours, since it offers existing and new users the opportunity to easily access an individual demo installation without any kind of technical know how, hosting, installation or setup required. Launchr can remove any kind of entry barrier for new users and we are hoping that this will aid you in growing your own community.

By setting up an individual installation in less than a minute, users will be able to try out new releases or use a sandbox installation to test new features, extensions or configurations without any hassle.

Since we firmly believe in the concept of open source software and feel strongly about encouraging such communities, we have created a community program allowing you to use Launchr for free and get you started with a initial setup of couchCMS.

If you'd like to learn more about the community program and/or join or have any other questions regarding our services, please feel free to contact me via email, pm, Skype (p.tipping) or simply by answering this post .

Cheers and have a nice day,

Patrick Tipping

[KK]

Hi Patrick,

Apologies for not replying back when you contacted us before.

I did take a look at Launchr then, though.
Seems to be a very good service and should be helpful for giving an easy way to new users to try out a CMS.

However, as it happens, I don't think it'll work for Couch.

Please let me explain -
You'll notice that we don't provide a demo on our own site (or elsewhere like http://www.opensourcecms.com/).

The reason is that out-of-the box, Couch provides only a (near) blank screen - no buttons to play with, no settings, nothing.

006.jpg (18.05 KiB) Viewed 2591 times

This is quite different to what other CMSes do.
The designer (or coder) then gives shape to the CMS by using his own HTML templates.
Every installation thus becomes unique with little resemblance to any other installation.

This process is usually a very iterative one that cycles through 'modify file' and 'see change' steps continuously (much like working directly with HTML in text-editor in past). Hence, it is better done on the local machine (once the site is fully done it can be easily migrated to a hosted server).

So, in my mind, setting up an online demo for Couch has two problems -
1. Users are conditioned to playing around with demos - flipping switches to make observable changes. This is not how Couch works and they'll get nothing of this sort to see. This makes the demo thing really pointless (and can actually prove negative).

2. Even if the users know how way things work, it is just not practical to expect them to make changes to their templates and (somehow) upload them to the demo server to see them.

I hope you can see what I am trying to convey.
Do let me know if you think otherwise.

Thanks.