Hey everyone,
As I'm sure most of you have seen, we've been quite busy working away on the new Cloud Platform. Things are going really well, and we've now got over 1100 organizations now using it, which is great. As we near the end of the beta and look towards launching the service live within coming weeks, we have realized that we will need to reorganize our site to accomodate both the open source and cloud versions of the app.
One thing that we've discussed at length is the challenges associated in having the Cloud Platform and the Open Source Platform share the same site. Notably the challenges have been:
1. How to separate people who need support for the cloud, from those who are using the free open source version.
2. How to highlight the differences between the two platforms in terms of features.
3. How to provide both FAQ's for the cloud platform, and also for the open version
4. Why users who sign up for the cloud platform would ever need to see things like docs, plugins, contributing etc. since they don't apply to the cloud.
When we launched 0.9 we really wanted to see if we could get the two products to work on the same site, but as we've gone down this path things have become more complex, and we've found that many users are confused about the difference between the two versions, and also where best to get support as the forums have become a mix of both cloud and open source questions.
To remedy this situation we've decided that we'll be making changes to the site to provide the open source community with a home that's dedicated purely to open source without the confusion of the differences between the two versions. We definitely feel it's important that the open source community be given a home of it's own where people can share things related to open source development that don't have anything to do with the cloud version.
As a result, we're planning on launching a new site for the Cloud Platform next week, and at that point we'll be moving the existing site (minus the cloud parts) to http://opensource.mediacore.com
There will be links between the two sites making it easy to switch from mediacore.com to opensource.mediacore.com and vice versa.
If anyone has any thoughts on this we're all ears.
Cheers,
Stuart
