Promoting Grunt?

[cowboy]

How can we better promote Grunt?

I, along with @sindresorhus and @Kahlil, who emailed us recently, have a few ideas.

We should:

• Tweet more consistently.
• Publish regular blog posts highlighting favorite plugins, tutorials, releases, etc.
• Create our own tutorials, screencasts, guides.
• Adjust docs to address community questions or misunderstandings.
• Respond to StackOverflow questions tagged gruntjs.
• Respond to relevant community comments, in general.

What else?

[khalillechelt]

🐗 👍

Having the list above addressed in a thorough way would be a great base to start off of I think.

❤️

[cowboy]

I think a good starting point would be to take each bullet item one-by-one and propose content ideas. Like what tutorials or screencasts should we create? Etc.

[sindresorhus]

Tweet more consistently.
Publish regular blog posts highlighting favorite plugins, tutorials, releases, etc.

Maybe some way to allow people to submit suggestions and encourage they doing so.

We could have a weekly/bi-weekly digest post that is a collection of @grunt tweets, community efforts and other things happening.

Adjust docs to address community questions or misunderstandings.

I think the most important thing we can do here is to move all the docs to the grunt-docs repo so people can file tickets/PRs.

Respond to StackOverflow questions tagged gruntjs.

Recommend people following the tag to help out. It's not clear that you can do that. We need more people helping each other out and answering questions.

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// @cowboy can you tweet about this ticket from @gruntjs?

[cowboy]

RT http://twitter.com/gruntjs/status/385064878660395008

[bevacqua]

How about a newsletter?

[sindresorhus]

@bevacqua if we go for a weekly digest post it could be both. But, we need someone willing to maintain it.

[Sequoia]

case studies, i.e. "so-and-so is using grunt to do XYZ- here's how"

[pfulton]

I would love to see more tutorials and blog posts about how Grunt benefits the "common" front-end dev. Perhaps a "why would I use this?" series.

[creativeaura]

I think a weekly digest with new trick and tips with useful tasks will be very helpful to developers. Or a live coding session on Hangout to show the best way to use it.

[thomasboyt]

How about Railscast-style screencasts (with text tutorials, if it's not too much extra work) that spotlight different Grunt tasks? Definitely want to show off the giant ecosystem :)

[mattdsteele]

Maybe evangelism swag? I'd love to have a Grunt sticker on my laptop; so when someone asks about it I can tell them the good news.

[isimmons]

"Create our own tutorials, screencasts, guides" <-- this
I'm not ashamed to say that "yes I want someone to hold my hand and walk me through the entire process" :-) Of course hand holding is not a requirement. I'll learn to use it anyway. But it definitely increases peoples willingness to dig in and then they start advocating for it.

[davidjgoss]

To expand on what @pfulton said, there's a feeling among many front-end developers and designers who are not so technically hardcore that tools like Grunt are over the top, cleverness for its own sake etc. This is a shame, and perhaps some content could be targeted at these people to encourage them to give it a try.

[bevacqua]

@mattdsteele stickers 👍

I agree screencasts would be very helpful.

Also, how about decoupling ourselves from Node? That would allow us to reach people who aren't using Node. I'm just talking about providing a stand-alone bundle, or something along those lines, for non-noders

[addyosmani]

Publish regular blog posts highlighting favorite plugins, tutorials, releases, etc

The common things I see front-enders new to Grunt trying to do include:

• Getting started (Gruntfile, package.json)
• Adding a linter
• Integrating a CSS preprocessor (Sass, Less)
• Starting a local server
• Live reload (maybe)
• Running tests
• Housekeeping (clean, best practices for matchdep etc)
• Deployment

It would be nice to see a set of tutorials or docs cover these. You'd be surprised at how often people simply don't read the READMEs nor grasp how easy it is to get some of this stuff setup. Complimentary screencasts showing each of these steps in a short, but clear way could also be helpful.

For more advanced users, cover how you can improve build performance/times. Things like how to concurrently run tasks, only run those tasks where files have changed (grunt-newer) etc.

Big plus one on more tweets. When it comes to recommending what tasks to tweet include some context. Why is this something you might want to use? How does it help? etc.

I'm more than happy to try helping with some of this.