How to make your web framework popular?

Question

I am developing open source web framework, it's almost ready but I still do not know how to promote it. What would you advice ? (except spamming stackoverflow, of course:) )

Answer 1

• Make it good
• Make good documentation (like symfony)
• Make sure there is a market for it
• Make a good website
• Promote it via usergroups, etc.
• Make sure that you have decent community featured like usergroups, IRC chat, forums

However, my experience is that it is definately the documentation that is the most important part. If you do that good, and your framework is as good as the documentation, you'll get the users :)

Answer 2

I suggest you read Paul Graham's essay Being Popular which dissects the popularity of programming languages. While your web framework isn't exactly a programming language, it probably qualifies as a Domain-specific language, making his suggestions fairly relevant.

He speaks about the importance of being a scripting language for a popular system (think Spring MVC to Spring), brevity (think Tapestry's simple jwcid attribute or Savant for PHP needing only 1 LoC to function), hackability (again, Spring MVC, allowing your own impl of framework interfaces), having expert hackers as your targeted user base (others will follow their lead), etc.