With the return (not yet complete) of the sourceforge stats it’s interesting to see the download numbers of the last couple releases. Also, the ZenMagick downloads on the zen-cart site do grow (about 500 AFAICT).

At sourceforge, in particular the number of downloads of the apidocs has surprised me a bit, considering that everything is available online. Maybe the work I put into the source code documentation is slowly paying off.

It would be nice to see more of the downloads converted into actual live sites using ZenMagick, but I guess that most software has a high percentage of downloads that get evaluated and then dismissed.

it’s nice to see that the time and work I put into this project do not get ignored completely

Despite that there is probably more to be done. One aspect of managing a project like ZenMagick that I have mostly ignored so far is marketing. I even have had a few people *complain* that they found ZenMagick only *after* spending a lot of time trying to get their design working in zen-cart and were suggesting that making  ZenMagick more visible  might be a good idea.

However, I am abit at a loss here. As an Open Source project, I do not have a budget (even though I have received a few donations) not the whish for traditional advertisement. Also, I guess I wounldn’t have a clue as to what to do anyway.

What I could imagine, though, is an approach that would be more in line with the spirit of Open Source projects and that would be a community effort to make ZenMagick more popular.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I do realize that there isn’t that much of a community (yet), but, as pointed out above, things do seem to improve. The frequency of forum posts is growing, the number of downloads is going up and the stats of this blog also indicate more interest.

So, what I imagine could help would be for you to:

• Dig or bookmark ZenMagick with your favorite bookmarking service
• Write about ZenMagick and your experiences
• Post reviews (even negative ones, as I usually learn more from those)
• Keep a ‘Powered by’ link in your finished store to let people find out what software you are using

Having more sites using ZenMagick would, of course, be good for me.  Although, it would also be good for the users, because:

• bugs do get found a lot faster
• more features will be requested (and hopefully implemented)
• more themes/plugins would be available
• things would just be better

I’ll leave it to you to come up with more ideas. Advertising on the zen-cart website seems, unfortunately, out of the question

mano