Thanks for the update Ryan. Coming from someone who has been an avid MODx enthusiast, user and advocate for over a decade, this is great to hear. Unfortunately, this may be too little, too late. Though I think most MODx'ers have been in the overall minority of developers for a long while, I might be in the growing majority of MODx'ers that are moving on to greener pastures.
I took part in the now infamous epic discussion here:
https://forums.modx.com/thread/90793/community-concerns
that started over two years ago but hasn't seen any real action for about six months now. This was a great exchange of ideas by the community and it was refreshing to see there was finally some serious talk about the future of MODx. Sadly, it appears that the core developers of MODx are just now getting around to forming the committees (MAB) to oversee any real movement forward. That's just too slow in a world where technology marches forward unrelentingly. That's not a criticism (I know the resources of time, talent and capital are limited), it's just a reality.
Case-in-point, I use to hate Wordpress with a white hot burning passion, but during the time that MODx has inched forward with a patch here and a hotfix there, WP has made real strides in turning that spaghetti coded monstrosity into a viable enterprise-worthy CMS. They've slowly won me over, especially now that Timber has married Twig to WP and they have a real templating system. That, along with the thousands of high quality, time saving plugins really makes it an easy sell to my clients.
Does this mean that I won't be back in the future when MODx 3.0 finally arrives on the scene? No way, I will be right in the front of the line to demo that tech, and I still have plenty of legacy sites to maintain that aren't going anywhere. But it's this humble developer's opinion that until you address the ease with which to extend the MODx manager and write plugins for it, it will never be able to compete in the CMS world. Everyday developers will simply never adopt it wholesale unless plugins become a large part of the economy, regardless of how superior the framework, API and templating system are.
What I'm trying to say is, don't be afraid to take what makes Wordpress (and other widely adopted CMS's) popular and successful, adopt those ideas, and fold them into the already best-in-industry framework that you already have. Here's to wishing MODx a swift journey back to relevancy.
Much respect,
Dan S.
MODX Staff
