I'm a intermediate user of phpNuke. And I've set up a few sites for myself, friends and some communitys. What brought me to Xtrato was the themes (free), the support on thoose themes and the friendly faces.

Some time ago, just before changing to vBulletin (i think) there was a change.
A change in focus and attitude. I cant pinpoint it but thats i s how I feel.
Now I feel this is more a "closed" community of designers and scripters. And not nearly as much "openness" and helpfullness to novice and intermediates as myself.

I belive that what makes a great community is the interaction beetween reguler people and experts. Remember that not all people can be great at design and so on, but if the greats has no one to share the art with its worthless.....see my point?

Take a step back and put some focus into helping people out, instead of focusing on designing this and that using renders or not.

Then slowly and with care, make people pay for that help (if making money is the objective).

That is just my thoughts on the matter, and I'm glad you brought it up! I showes insight and great perspective on things!

I will continue to visit as I have all along, but if you want to make the community grow, I belive that it has to be more attractive to the "middleman".

Another thought is that you could "team-up" with a community such as Ravens http://ravenphpscripts.com/ to offer a completeness in phpNuke that would be unmatched.

Ravens community offer a secure phpNuke distribution with great support and friendly people just like what I think I used to find here. If you could offer free themes (with options to donate for downloading them) together with great support along with Raven you could get a lot of new constantly returning members.

Maby a first step is to ask Raven to include a theme from Xtrato in the next release of RavenNuke? as default theme?

I think Raven is a great person just as I think Xtrato is, keep it up!

Cheers and thanx for a good site (not great as it were, but it can be again!)

/B