Getting a package adopted... or how to market a package?

Packages
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In my bid to get django-prodserver adopted by more people in the community (with the hopeful eventual goal of a merge into core), I started tracking potential marketing tasks as well as development issues.

I have this project to track the marketing side of things: django-prodserver marketing · GitHub

I’m sharing for few reasons:

  1. I haven’t seen this really discussed much in an explicit manner
  2. Have I missed any good ideas in my project?
  3. Perhaps we as community can produce a bit of a playbook for marketing a package? Not that a playbook would guarantee success, but it would likely lighten the load for future package creators/maintainers.
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I don’t have any other marketing ideas at the moment, but I’m definitely in support of a playbook.

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Things I recommend:

  • A memorable name
  • Good-looking docs. Instantly bumps the trust factor of the package.
  • A strong associated emoji. For example Wagtail :bird:, Django :unicorn:, React :atom_symbol:, Python :snake:, Postgres :elephant:, etc
  • Screenshot in the README. Even for something not particularly visual. It’s just way more memorable. Alternative: a logo of some kind.
  • List at least 2-3 prominent / early users in the README, ideally with a link to the project in question
  • Social media posts for significant releases (you define significant)
  • 2-3 blog posts about the package in action

And last but not least… I wish more packages came with a ready to use demo. Not necessarily as in it has to be live/online, just a demo app in the package repo. Where in 2-3 min I can clone; venv; install; manage.py and see something that works, without having to set up the package myself on a project (I’m lazy!)

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