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Can anyone tell me how to lift my open-source project off the ground?

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mouser:
first, welcome to the site and you've posted in the right section.  :up:

i think the dirty little secret of the open source world is that most open source projects never get any more participation outside of the original developer.
it's just a reality of coding that most people will not find it in their interest to work on an open source project until it is sufficiently active and developed and maintained.  in other words, it's like a chicken and egg problem.  you need more people to help bring your project to the next level, but no one wants to invest their time until it's already at that level..

i think the reality that most of us have to accept is that we have to be willing to largely go it alone when releasing a new open source project, for quite some time, until it proves itself in the real workplace and proves that it's not going anywhere.  that will mean a long term commitment from the original coder.  short of that im afraid most open source projects won't ever get off the ground.

xananax:
@vlastimil: If I invested enough time to understand them, would that be time well spent?
--- End quote ---
No :)
Well, mostly no at least.
It would be time well spent to understand them if you intend to work on them. They aren't fit for use yet. probably filled with bugs, some functions left in TODO stage, etc.
Some of them are finished though: the colorhtml class, the image provider class, and the datatypes classes. But they lack docs.
they look professional, organized and complex
--- End quote ---
I take this as a compliment...Organized and complex, they are; professional I don't know. I have no idea of my level as a coder (I am self-taught). I *think* I am quite good, but I don't know. This is also why I would like input from peers.

@mouser: I was expecting this answer...Well I'll just have to hang on it seems

Thanks all for the answers!

vlastimil:
If you decide to go the CMS route, here are a two points that could help you differentiate:
* integrated analytics - webmasters and content contributors love feedback. If you can quickly tell which of your articles attracted the most interest, what kind of users liked them, where they came from, if the users became regular visitors, that is very valuable.
* zero-maintenance categorization and interlinking - wikipedia makes it easy to link to another article with [[]]. That's good, but it is still a manual action and as the site grows, the internal linking becomes harder and harder to manage. If you could design a system that would take care of internal linking and categorization, people would love your CMS. It should update links in older articles, when new article is added; it should find popular related content taking the data from the integrated analytics into account.

xananax:
The CMS is still a very far away idea for now...There is so much I gotta do with the toolbox first.
But these are good idea, if I ever get to that stage, I'll definitely implement the interlinking one (so easy to do, I wonder why it's not frequent), and I'll think about the analytics idea (although a plugin that uses some external API would probably be better-suited).
As a side-note, wordpress comes with "integrated" analytics of sort. It's a plugin, but you don't have to download it.

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