Recently some members of the October CMS community were invited to join our new Partner program. This program is an effort to build a strong team of service providers who work with October allowing them to list their businesses on this website. Today we are revealing the Partners page which we hope will be a valuable resource for connecting end users with developers, designers and hosting providers from all around the world.

You can learn more about the program and join via the partner registration page. Put simply there are four levels of partnership — Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum — with an annual partnership fee. Pricing starts at $150/year for the Bronze level and the visibility in the partner directory is determined by the commitment level. For example, Bronze partners are displayed as simple links whilst Platinum partners are displayed with a big, prominent, customizable banner.

The Platinum partner level is exclusive, meaning there can be only a single Platinum partner per category (hosting, development or technical support). From the first announcement we had a hosting partner jump on board, Atlantic.Net, who have a one-click workflow for deploying October. There is another platinum partner lined up for the development category who should make an appearance soon. At the moment the technical support category is still available.

Partners are welcome to join the program and support the project at any time. We want to thank all the partners who got involved early, every dollar makes a huge difference to pushing October forward and translates to a better platform for everyone to enjoy.

Promotions

Plugin promotions is another tool that was rolled out a few days ago. This feature acts as a simple, effective and inexpensive way to get more exposure for your plugins. If your plugin page doesn't get enough traffic or you've recently added new features and want to showcase them, promotions can help you to do that.

Each product has its own conversion rate — a ratio of purchases and pageviews:

conversion rate = purchases / pageviews

Conversion rate is usually more or less a constant and depends on the quality of your product, its consumer rating, the quality of the product description, documentation and screenshots. With a given constant conversion rate, if you want to increase the number of purchases, you should increase the number of pageviews.

purchases = pageviews * conversion rate

Promotions is the best way boost traffic to the plugin's page, displaying the listing at the very top of the Marketplace page. A promoted plugin gets the most prominent place of the entire October CMS Marketplace, highlighted with a brighter background to get more attention.

Promotions can be purchased right from the plugin management page for one week, two weeks or a month. One week promotion is just $7 and there are builk discounts for longer periods.

While this feature is great for boosting exposure, keep in mind that you can always increase the sales volume for free by working on the quality of the plugin and everything that surrounds it — from the icon to the documentation. Remember that the first impression often is the most important. If the plugin page fails to impress a visitor, you won't get many sales regardless of the page traffic.

Thanks for supporting October CMS

All money raised via these programs will go to directly to funding October CMS development. At the moment we're focused on building a strong community and finding ways to support the project into the future. Preferably in ways that are well-received and a win-win situation, allowing the community to work together and the core team to dedicate more time towards working on the platform.

October CMS itself, the technical support, documentation and the work we do in maintaining the open source community will always be free for users. The partnership program will help us to focus more on the project and keep delivering new features, bug fixes and tools for authors and the community.

As October matures into the third year of its life. The groundwork has been laid and the features implemented are just the tip of the iceberg of what's possible. We have some more big ideas ahead, all we need now is the time and freedom to work on it. Thanks to everyone who supports us and for backing the future of October CMS!

Let's keep building!