gistfile1.txt

The best way to create demand for Perl is to have desirable, plug-in extensible applications out there written in Perl.

PHP is an extremely problematic language, but its community excelled at creating and supporting applications written in it. End users settled on PHP apps, creating a market for talent that went on to more than triple Perl's demand for programmers: http://langpop.com/.

Only a few years ago, the WebGUI content management system used to power huge amounts of the Web and create jobs for hundreds of Perl programmers. WebGUI was the number one most popular mod_perl application for many years, but like Zappos.com, Walmart.com or the original Amazon.com (http://oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/perl/news/amazon_0100.html), the fact that it was written in Perl was a loosely guarded secret.

Mitsubishi, Brunswick, large .gov sites including american.gov, and many corporate sites were powered by WebGUI. http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ and similar sites still give WebGUI top ranking in terms of power, extensibility, and professionalism.

While frameworks like Catalyst were a huge step forward for Perl, we've still one step behind. When we were still doing CGI, PHP had an easy to use, easy to install Apache mod. By the time Perl was catching up with Ruby on Rails with things like Catalyst, most new sites were being built on of CMSes, and for good reason. A CMS gives you, out of the box, most of what any new site needs: a user system, verification, password recovery, user administration, discussion boards, photo galleries, and a pile of other useful things.

Advanced Perl programmers may prefer to start with a framework, but novices almost always start with a CMS and then learn how to customize it. For most applications, there's already a plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/) that gets you 90% of the way there. You can launch your new custom job/resume board in an evening, such as http://coinality.com did. WebGUI's Bazaar is competitive: http://www.webgui.org/addons.

WordPress is hard to extend and has a history of security problems. WebGUI has a rabid following among people who have used Dupal, WordPress, and a host of other systems, and declared it to be the most powerful, most extensible, most sane, all around best system... and it's written in Perl.

Here's the problem. After paying a dedicated programmer to work on the next version for over a year, Plain Black Corp apparently decided to focus on other things. Version 8 got left undone, as an alpha. 7 is still being maintained, but 8 was a massive modernization effort that reworked core to use Moose, Plack, Try::Tiny, and cleaned things up.

Thanks to fantastic test suite coverage, the API and core of 8 work well, but the rewritten admin needs attention. Also, WebGUI has traditionally targeted large companies, so the difficult install process was not a major liability. To compete, installation has to be dead simple. The themes are not adequately modern (which is to say they look a little outdated).

I plan to get wG8 out of alpha, move it to a community development model, finish the installer I created for it and OSX support, and work with designers to create a modernized theme.

While I was previously employed by Plain Black Corp, this Kickstarter was not reviewed or endorsed by them.  My motivation is simply loyalty to the friends I made providing community support and hacking on this thing with the denizens of #webgui and at WebGUI Users Conferences, a desire to see something awesome finished, and to create the demand for Perl programmers that I want to see.