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Hey Bera,

Thanks for posting on the forum. Just to let you know I do work at ZK offices however what I post below in response is just my personal opinion.

First of all I would like to thank you for your feedback. Everything mentioned here will be brought up internally for discussion. I can however, answer some points with my own opinion and experiences.

Innovation!

Screencasts are something I am a big proponent of and gives users the ability to catch up with the technology quickly. I do like it but to make it worthwhile we would need a large number of users who prefer this method of learning. So I ask everyone in this thread.

How would you feel about ZK screencasts? Do you use screencasts to learn technology or do you prefer more traditional means such as documentation?

Documentation

I agree the website needs an overhaul in certain areas it is definitely something that we are looking into. At the moment we cannot get rid of the older documentation as some people are still using the older version of ZK, therefore we need to maintain it.

For step by step I would recommend taking a look at ZK Essentials, that should walk you through the process step by step. Or maybe the tutorials here. Are these enough for you? If not what would you like to see?

Books

I can confirm that we have had approaches from publishers wanting to do a follow-up on our previous books. However, there are some issues I personally see with books for ZK.

ZK is a highly innovative framework which introduces new releases every 1-2 months, this means that any book that we do now will not contain the very latest information on release. This is OK for competing frameworks that move at a slower pace than us but for us it isn't a good situation. This is the reason why our documentation underwent an overhaul ending in the ability to generate a PDF book from it. If you take a look at all our documentation it is in the format of a book.

I would ask whether you enjoy this style? Would a published book still be meaningful to you?

Open Source

I agree, I think we need a method of encouraging more people to write blogs, tutorials and articles etc. Actually we do have methods in place such as discounts for commercial licenses and support. However, it seems these haven't reached the users effectively. So I turn the question to everyone in this thread, how do you feel we can encourage people to get involved more?

In addition we probably do not do as good a job of promoting the ZK ecosystem, for example were you aware that a contributor's work was featured in yahoo news recently? I am refering to ZK Grails which got press there. Perhaps we need to celebrate this.

ZK 2010

"decisions should be take for rescue ZK from the limbo"

I think this comes down to the fact that we do not promote ourselves well enough to our community. Just to give you all some background on what happened in 2010.

ZK has had the most successful year it has ever had in 2010, we are deployed in around a quarter of all Fortune 500 companies around the world and we are anticipating a 1,000,000 user deployment very soon (yes that's 1,000,000 no typo). We aren't in "limbo", quite the opposite, we are moving forward and forward becoming more and more successful.

Therefore I would ask the community as to how you would promote this news? How would you say to the world as a whole ZK is going from strength to strength?

Finally..

I agree with some of the points you bring up Bera, however, I see these points as "symptoms" of the root cause. This root cause being how can we work with you (our community) more effectively to spread ZK? It is an interesting question and one I would like to explore with everyone in this thread. Any feedback is more than welcome on these topics.**