David Molliere is a freelance webdesigner living in Paris. He runs his personal site david-molliere.net.

Currently he is heading the marketing effort for MODx, an open source CMS and php application framework.

David likes to cook and is quite an amateur wine buff (not only French wine!). His main hobby is digital photography, which tags along well with a taste for travelling and long weekends. He is a big reader of thrillers, a ravenous watcher of US TV shows, and goes to the movies at least twice a week.

Q. Hi David, are you an extensive shopper :)?

LOL :)

Well it depends what I am shopping for. Don’t ever get me close to a high-tech store or a wine shop or I might end up on a shopping spree, burning my credit card to shreds ;) That’s how I recently got myself a 17” MacBook Pro or a 1998 Saint Estèphe, not a reasonnable thing to buy but hey, how could I resist?

Q. You are the main marketing director of MODx. That does imply you are responsible to popularize MODx CMS. Correct?

Director might be too strong a word :P , especially if you consider that there is no rigid structure at MODx. Things are not based on status, but rather on involvement and skills.

Ryan Thrash (founder) is the one who offered me to join the team and help the marketing effort in November 2005. I had created some buzz to make MODx quite a popular CMS in France. I wrote an article about MODx for a famous french webzine about opensource software, which is among the top referrers of modxcms.com. Also, I posted a review of MODx at Webmaster-Hub, which got quite some attention. Of course, it’s easier to stand out in the French world than in the English speaking community where the competition is fierce, but it was enough to convince Ryan that I would be an asset for MODx marketing.

One very nice thing for me is that Ryan is pretty involved with marketing MODx (and has lots of great ideas), as is Zaigham (aka Zi), modxcms.com outstanding designer’s and forum admin. Nicola Lambathakis (aka Banzai) – italian moderator and prolific template creator – is also part of the effort (see YouTube links below). Right now, I consider myself as the guy who impulses and coordinates the marketing efforts and acts as a MODx evangelist (not unlike what I did unofficially for Textpattern). I still spend a lot of time moderating the French board and contributing to the French community. Luckily, there are more and more key contributors in the French boards and I’ll be able to focus on marketing a bit more.

Q. Which specific marketing measurements do you use for MODx? In other words: how do you market the MODx product?

For me, those are two separate things.

How do we market MODx ? Right now it’s fairly similar to most open source CMS out there : we have the main modxcms.com website with the unavoidable “selling pitch” (which is currently undergoing some rewrite and update). Many international MODx websites have been created like modx.ru, modx.it, modxcms.de and many others (including the soon to be modxcms.fr). A testimony to the community dynamics born at the MODx forums.

On top of the main website, we are registered at SourceForge and opensourcecms.com, and also on most major software listing like softpedia, freshmeat, hotscripts…etc. Nicola (Banzai) has also made two nice MODx videos on YouTube (Video One and Video Two).

The rest of our marketing effort is primarily the evangelism part of the job (essentially Ryan and I), posting on various forums like stylegala or sitepoint, publishing interviews and so on. Of course we don’t have the kind of firepower big and well established CMS like Joomla or Drupal have, with books and press coverage but I don’t necessarily think this kind of mass marketing is adaptable for MODx. We target a very specific category of people, and we’ve started communicating about this more consistently in the past weeks. Give a look at Ryan Thrash’s new forum signature and you’ll get what I mean :

MODx is ideal for web developers and XHTML/CSS designers that need a customizable web app framework they can confidently turn over to their ultimate end-users for day-to-day site maintenance. We’ll move towards less technically-experienced users – and create better documentation – in the future, but we have to focus on getting it right first! “Newbies” are very welcome here and we love them in our community. But please read the wiki, Google search the forums, learn a bit of PHP and CSS, examine the parameters in the snippet code, and then fire away with questions.

As Ryan says, first things first : we’re focused on the road to MODx 1.0 where all links to the Etomite legacy will be severed (0.9.5 has already been a huge step in that direction, by the way), and we will definitely enter a new era for MODx, and possibly a whole different league altogether ;D

Now, about marketing measurements. There are a few things that I keep my eye on :

• the registered users trend : what is our user base (we did prune about 800 unused accounts recently to get a better view of where we stand there) ? Does it keep growing steadily ? Is there a sudden rise in forum users ? How is activity on the forums ? That’s the quantitative part, but being an intensive reader and contributor of the forum, I sure watch more qualitative informations like what’s the profile of those new contributors : are they newbies ? or more skilled profiles ? It’s harder to pin down but certainly a great source of information.
• the main modxcms.com stats : of course there are page views, but I have a regular look at referring websites and search keywords and key phrases. It sure helps knowing who talks about you and what is being said.

Q.What are you personal goals for MODx 2007?

There are many nice things coming for 2007, my personal goal is to keep up with what my team mates have in store! And believe me, it’s sometimes hard to keep up with the crazy pace there (lol).

Seriously, the first step for me is the upcoming 0.9.5 release will really be a “maturity release”. It may seem like a paradox, but you have to remember MODx is derived from Etomite and as such bears a legacy. This release will be accompanied by rewrites/edit of the marketing content of modxcms.com.

The next step will really be a big break for MODx, severing almost all ties to the Eto legacy and introducing xPDO. In a way, it will be an intermediary release. There will be a lot of work explaining how it does enhance MODx capabilities, what it means for designers and developers and for the future of MODx. We should definitely get there by the end of 2006 / early 2007.

Then, there is the major step which is 1.0 itself. Basically a full rewrite of the MODx core which started a year ago, object oriented and based on xPDO. There would be too much to say about it, and none of it would match what the author of the new codebase, Jason Coward (aka OpenGeek) could tell you. Allow me to oversimplify and say MODx is currently a framework built on top of core CMS features, but with 1.0 it will be a CMS built on top of a core framework.

Now, what I’d like to see happen in late 2006 and early 2007 is really build a marketing team to go forward with the plan we collectively drafted. Essentially, my main goal is set up things so that we are ready for the 1.0 release.

I won’t go into the whole detail, but stick to the main items :

• Blog, blog and blog ! I’d like the team blog to really become a place for people to discuss with team members and get some “inside infos” about the future of the project. The hard part is, blogging takes time and team members are overworked already. I for one did not yet publish my first blog post there :/ Too much time on MODx forums I am afraid! That’s the downside of the great mood and ideas flowing there :P
• Build a website showcasing the best MODx websites to demonstrate what can be achieved with MODx. Not unlike what txpmag Site Collection did for Textpattern!
• Provide new resources for the team : For me, it’s really key for the project. Textpattern users have heard about Team Textpattern, or seen many OS projects provide hosting or charter members program. This has to be carefully handled, money and open source community dynamics don’t easily mix. It calls for some innovative ideas and smart management. Hopefully we’ll be able to pull it off :) A real challenge ! It sure could make for an entirely different article : “Finance Open source project”!

Thanks David for the interview.

The interview was already taken back in December 06.