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(This post contains shameless self promotion)

I think GUI elements are an essential part of a web development framework nowadays. I maintain a small open source CMS called Enano. It's very basic, but during the course of its development I've written a ton of GUI building-blocks, among other frameworkey things, and documented the APIs for them so that plugins can use the same features. Regarding the GUI elements, I think consistent interfaces are an important part of any web application. Thus, what better way is there than to use a good, solid framework that, among its other jobs, takes care of some of the GUI design ugliness for you? Stuff like a standard way to present and validate forms, show message boxes, log in users, provide visual feedback for a process, etc.

In my opinion, a framework should do more than just provide a bunch of random pick-and-choose APIs that you can use. It should take care of the boring details you don't want to have to rewrite for a web app, like user account management, sessions, user data, database abstraction, that kind of thing. That's why people are writing applications using software like Drupal and Enano: they want to write a web app that does what it needs to do without having to reinvent the wheel. I'm currently using Enano as the foundation for an e-commerce site (contracted project). Yeah, eating my own dog food, but shows that it can be easy to take something like Enano/Drupal/Wordpress and use its existing, established core features to write a whole new application that uses those features.

Yes, I've used a more traditional framework before (CodeIgniter). It's great, and I love its design for basic applications, but you still have to write your own user management and a lot of other prerequisites to create something like an e-commerce site. In contrast, I've developed the entire e-commerce plugin with about 50-60 hours of work, including a couple of very minor modifications to the core.

As for our project, Enano CMS, we'd definitely appreciate people willing to write documentation, or even translate the CMS into their own preferred language! Those are actually probably the most important tasks right now.

Though, if it is coding you're looking for, we do have coding tasks that we'd like to get done. If anyone's interested, all they have to do is hop into our IRC channel on Freenode (#enano).

Make the link to the "demo" front and center. Forget about "screenshots" -- it's a web application, who wants to see screenshots when you can click a link and see the web app in action!

You're right. Changed this.

Let people using Enano send in a link (or edit a wiki page of links) linking to their homepage. This will give end-users with tiny sites an incentive to try your package, because it will drive traffic to them. Long ago, I used a CMS called Serendipity that had exactly this marketing tactic, and it worked well.

How would you recommend we get this off the ground? I feel like the list has to have at least 20-ish sites, or people will just go "this is a joke."

Uh.. you really need themes available. Think of myspace, etc. People like to customize their sites.

I'm trying to think of a better way to promote the Enanium backgrounds plugin. Basically you drop in a .jpg file and a 16x16 .png icon and Enanium (the new shiny default theme I designed at some point along the 1.1.x beta series) does all the dirty work of applying it as a background for your site. That's the most common form of customization I've seen people using.

Offtopic: The other reason I stayed anonymous because I haven't been "dandaman32" in about 3 years. It's one of those juvenile nicknames you can never seem to get rid of. That, and this account's got karma on /. and I can thus get my daily news fix without staring at flash ads.

From taking a 10-second look at the :

• Make the link to the "demo" front and center. Forget about "screenshots" -- it's a web application, who wants to see screenshots when you can click a link and see the web app in action!
• Let people using Enano send in a link (or edit a wiki page of links) linking to their homepage. This will give end-users with tiny sites an incentive to try your package, because it will drive traffic to them. Long ago, I used a CMS called Serendipity that had exactly this marketing tactic, and it worked well.
• Uh.. you really need themes available. Think of myspace, etc. People like to customize their sites.

At the risk of killing his VPS, here is the project homepage.

(After looking at Enano CMS.)
No one else mentioned this but for utility, as a user, I would also look for:

• no beta level; there must be production-level version (if you achieved that level already then change the name but it must have all the bugs ironed out for the most common use cases).

OK. So this is the/a website:
http://enanocms.org/

Yet another Content Management System in a sea of Content Management Systems. Not easy to get attention. Plus it's still in Beta. That alone will cross it off of the list of many people looking for something.

Of note, there are no reviews on Sourceforge yet. That is a missed opportunity right there.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/enano/

Do a quick google on "compare cms" and see what you come up with. Are you one the comparison site lists? Then you aren't even in the running. There are simply too many CMS packages out there. People need a quick summaries on comparison websites to assess functionality & requirements.

I for one am glad you screwed up and didn't log out...

Seriously... I spent two days last month looking for a wiki with a usable WYSIWYG editor that didn't require stupid hacks...

Lo and behold, here it is... this is slick. Just installed it in MAMP and I'll be checking this out a little more in-depth tomorrow. Failing major security holes or browser incompatibilities, I may start using Enano relatively soon.

And no, I'm not affiliated in any way... just really impressed at first glance.

He did a google search of 'dandaman32' probably and followed the link results. That is what I did and found out a bit more about the project.

Though, it seems that Enano CMS has a professional-looking website, a Freshmeat page, an ohloh page, a BitNami stack page, and a Twitter feed.

Did I miss anything? ;-)

A lot of developers believe that somehow they are entitled to money just because they're good-hearted enough to release their software as FOSS. I'm not saying this is necessarily you, but I hold a strong view that if you serve it, they will come. Write software that does exactly what people expect it to with a UI that they can understand. Listen to (read?) support requests and respond to even the most stupid questions in a way that is tactful and informative. If you do a good job and show a genuine commitment to your project, people will donate.

Also, and I can't stress this enough, be VERY careful about asking for donations. If you nag people to death about it then you won't ever get a cent. Nagging, at least in my experience, is usually defined as a reminder to donate when your software is started or closed, or a prominent animated/garish button on your website.

From my own FOSS project's Donations page:

Many developers of Free Software tend to believe that they are somehow entitled to money just because they develop Free Software. They see their work as a source of money. ... We don't believe in that sort of crap. Free Software should be free (duh). We also don't believe in nagging users to death about donations, because we know that if you want to donate, you'll go onto the site and donate. So here you are, the only donate button in the entire Enano universe.

I did a tad bit of reverse engineering on their proxy. It's a spare server from some consulting company (147932-web1.dipconsultants.com) running a Squid configured to check for the string "Deluge BitTorrent" in the user agent. Not only that, but it sends the X-Forwarded-For header, as can be seen with a simple script: http://germantown.enanocms.org/headers.php. False sense of anonymity if you ask me.

Also, their URL filter doesn't seem to whitelist sites at all, or if it is a whitelist, it's a pretty wide one. I posted this message through the proxy. Target.com, fark.com, and christmas-cookies.com all worked fine through the proxy.

--Dan