International modx websites : let's choose a strategy

Some french users, including Aour (moderator) and Nissai (translator) have brought up again the issue of launching a french modx website.

Last time, I had insisted that they wait a little and hold off till I had some information to communicate to them about the international mini-sites that we talked about.

We now have several modx websites (probably some I don’t even know of) : german, italian, chinese... etc, which is good but also could lead to resources dispersion and communication & identity problems. For instance, when aour had set up a temporary french forum and wiki (it was a while back, before I came onboard), he had chosen the domain : tattoocms.info. Same goes for Banzai’s http://www.tattoocms.it/

It’s now clear Tattoo will be entirely different from MODx in terms of targeted segment. Shouldn’t Tattoo resources be well separated from MODx resources ? Otherwise we could end up having users confused which is not good... I have raised this issue with Aour and wait for some input about the domain name.

I know many things are cooking right now with the release but I think this is an important issue. A possible way to deal with this would be to phase this into several stage :

• Let initiatives happen like we have, but insist as much as possible on avoiding resources dispersion (several websites by country)
• Ask those who have a tattoo domain name to switch for a modx name, possibily setting up a naming convention (such as modxcms-countrycode.com. Ex : modxcms-fr.com, modxcms-de.com... etc. Or better for countries allowing this (not the case in France), modxcms.de, .it... etc
• Get an estimate of the availability of the multilingual modxcms website (e.g english website with language links pointing to mini-sites version)
• Work out a tranfer of content from the international website to the official one (is that a good idea or not ?)

What do you think ?

I’d love localized microsites that are basically translated mini-brochures, designed in any way anyone wants to design them, but linking back to the main MODx site for the majority of the stuff.

We need then to be able to translate the documentation here as well which will probably wait for the MODx 1.0 branch as it will make it infinitely easier to manage.

Okay, so we hold off any strategizing on this matter for now and let things happen ?

Quote from: davidm at Apr 04, 2006, 10:14 AM

Okay, so we hold off any strategizing on this matter for now and let things happen ?

That’d be my vote.

I love avoiding complex rules and unnecessary management in favor of simple principles and ideas which allow our community to explore solutions limited only by imagination, be it a technical solution to accomplish something in the product, or a marketing site created to attract attention. I’ve been amazed since I started working in the field of Knowledge Management and exploring concepts like CoP (Communities of Practice) at how much more innovation can occur in communities and organizations guided by clear, simple principles and ideas vs. those driven by complex rules and regulations (i.e. over-managed), no matter what the original intention of such rules and regulations might have been. Avoiding micro-management of this kind of thing IMO, should help incubate the kind of community innovation we need to continue seeing, and motivate a greater variety, quality, and quantity of user contributions.

Good points indeed, though in my mind I never meant to be one of the bureaucrats

I have long been a km student of sorts and my master’s thesis was about chaos theory principles applied to management, I sure can appreciate those points I sure don’t want to fall into the micro-management pit