Tips for a Successful Project

Part of the goal of Plone Software Center is to make Plone's add-ons more friendly for integrators and end users. For these users, a good name for your product will be very helpful.

I'd recommend you steer away from names that:

- contain implementation-level details

- are excessively technical

- are vague

For example, Plone Software Center itself was originally called "ArchPackage", which violated all three principles:

- it contained the name "Arch", suggesting that it was Archetypes-based. This is not so critical or important feature for someone shopping for a useful software-listing-product that it's worth putting in the title.

- The abbreviation for "Arch" as Archetypes is obscure enough that even some people that know what Archetypes is wouldn't have recognized it anyway.

- The name "package" is too vague for people to understand that these are software products being managed.

With these ideas in mind, I'd steer clear of any of the "CMF*", "Plone*", "AT*" naming schemes. Better is to find a name that users can associate with your product, rather than one that tries to explain exactly what it does, or how it does it.

Good names:

- Haystack (a product for extracting searchable information from data)

- Archetypes

- LinguaPlone

They're all suggestive and "product-y".

Similarly, when writing your project description, consider that people looking at your project may have no idea what is does. Focus on explaining what it is for *rather than* how it works (avoid the tendency to lead with "I used a BTree...", for example).

To help make sure the product repository is as helpful as possible for our community, the plone.org team may suggest edits your project description for clarity.