Promoting and Documenting an Open Source Project

As any of my readers will know, I was part of a team to build the DOMi project, which is an open source PHP object designed for XSL driven websites. The project has had less activity than we would like, and as it is the first project like this for any of us, we are at a loss on how to promote this project.

The three of us genuinely feel that this paradigm is the way of future web development, and all of us use it exclusively in our projects. So there's no lack of love or passion or dedication for this project, we just don't know how to get others to give it a shot and see how well it works.

I recently did some documentation for the project. I hope that helps move it along. We should've done this from the start. It's hard to just give out an object like this and assume everyone can figure out how to use it, especially since some of the internals are doing really odd things. It has some good Javadoc style markup in it, though, which should've helped.

Documentation is a bore, though. A necessary evil that must be endured to get a project on it's feet. I'll be thrilled once this is out there and being used for the next generation of web development. HTML echo needs to be phased out, just like table based designs are being phased out. There is no two ways about it - XSL driven systems are superior to HTML echo driven systems.