Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Sysadmin magizine is looking for a low budget ecommerce article for Feb 2003

I built freedomfeeder.com and integro-llc.com, both ecommerce+ sites based on OpenACS 3.2x. Unfortunately both sites are gone now. The freedomfeeder solution was a great success; due to increased international sales and reduced overhead.

I am presently working on OACS4.5 solutions for williamskitchen.com, wmsdist.com, and completestopfireworks.com but we are in early stages of design (a.k.a. lots of meetings and arm waving); no delivery dates have been set. All three will be ecommerce enabled.

Not sure if that helps, but the idea of OACS promotion (beyond what I preach) would be a big help. Perhaps we should have a place to post our success stories... a home for posting news, web site grand openings, mini-case studies, industry events, etc. Not unlike the web site portfolio I present to my prospects, but for the OpenACS Community. There is great power in numbers, and several thousand downloads must have resulted in some pretty exciting works.

Also, what is stopping us from leveraging off of the original ACS installations? At the very least to say, "ACS, the Oracle version and OACS the open-source (Postgresql) version are the foundations for all these great web sites: {insert names here}." Hey, for that matter, what harm is there in saying OACS has its origin from the very same core that RedHat uses for their CCM Community solution. (offtopic: does anyone know how much RedHat charges for a CCM solution, btw?)

Successful marketing and promotion of OACS puts bread on my table... let me know how I can help. Oh, and if someone is starting a donation pit for OACS marketing/promo, let me know where to send the check? /nb

Ummm one more idea... in line with the "success stories" above, we might have a "press" section on OACS that lists key info, overviews, dates, history of, contacts, releases, etc. to support the press's need for details. Yea, I know, more work. /nb