A Quick Guide to Driving a Project to Success with Sourceforge

This is a guest blog post from eXo.At eXo, we’ve been partnering with SourceForge since 2003. As an open-source project, which transformed into a professional open-source vendor over the years, we’ve found SourceForge to be the best place for distributing our software. I’m pleased to share some of our experience with the system.

 

Do your basic homework

SourceForge provides an impressive list of software project management tools (forums, mailing lists, version control, wiki, tickets, etc.). However, your first stop is to choose a categorization for your project and fill in the metadata carefully. This sounds obvious, but it is critical for standing out from the mass of projects living on SourceForge. Put the right name and the right keywords in your description, add a few compelling screenshots and design a logo. Hint: Look at your competitors and do better.

Downloads are your driving force

Once we had this done properly, we found we were easier to find on SourceForge and more traffic started to come to our own website.

But for us, the killer feature is the file management tool. It has a simple yet efficient design that makes it very easy to upload a file via an SCP web interface. Any file referenced as your primary download will turn instantly into a very appealing button on the project page.

And you know what? It works. Visitors just click it and download your software because it looks so easy.

But what’s really great about file management on SourceForge is that it comes with download statistics. At any time, you can see how many people have downloaded your software, where they came from and what operating system they are used. At eXo, we’ve even built a dashboard to track our downloads through the very convenient Download Stats API.

 

So, last year, when we launched eXo Platform 4.0, we decided to make SourceForge the unique location from which to download our eXo Platform Community Edition package. This turned out to be one of our best decisions ever.

The number of downloads instantly took off to levels we had never seen before. We ranked better in SourceForge listings and a virtuous loop started. As we got more reviews, more people visited our website from SourceForge, leading to more downloads, leading to a better rank, and so on. Within a couple of months, the rate of community registration had literally been boosted by an order or magnitude. And things have never stopped since then.

 

Foster your community: build a marketplace

 

As a happy consequence of this renewed success and a growing community, we saw many discussions in the forums. People from different horizons came with new ideas and requirements. We observed a blossoming of side projects built by very motivated individuals to address their requirements. So much creativity had to be made public. We needed to provide a place to promote these projects. That’s why we built the eXoAdd-on center, a collection of third-party add-ons to complement eXo Platform’s core features. Add-ons can be many things, like templates, new apps such as for blogging or chatting or new integrations such as Google Drive or Bonita.

 

 

The add-on center is open to all eXo community members. Submitting an add-on to the center is as simple as filling in a form to describe what it does and where to get the downloads and docs. In fact, eXo imposes no special constraints on add-ons except they must be related to eXo Platform. An add-on can even be proprietary or commercial software but making it open source and free will bring more benefits.

First, we can host open-source code on GitHub under the official exo-addons organization. Second, we can host add-on files on SourceForge, giving them extra exposure and statistics.

The cherry on the cake is that since eXo is referenced in the SourceForge Enterprise directory, add-ons can be promoted directly on our SourceForge project page.

For an open-source project, SourceForge can be a key driver to your downloads and popularity. If you have a business on top of your project, I suggest making SourceForge an integral part of your open-source strategy. Any decision around your strategy should start by asking yourself how you can leverage SourceForge before building anything yourself.