Quote from: mrhaw1. I Love FRED for 100 reasons, one is that it is open source, and open source in the aspect of being FREE. I have never used The premium extra "modmore contentblocks" but I have recommended people to check it out and advertised it for free. I personally have no interest in using premium tools, It's an open source passion of mine. I have seen some really sweet subscription based CMS's out there. But I haven't seen one that can beat MODX yet and probably will never do. Because MODX loves Creative Freedom like no other system.
Thank you for that.
Quote from: mrhaw2. To cry about FRED being released makes me hesitant what the intentions are among the MODX3 developers who spend a lot of time pushing their premium extras. Is MODX3 too much tied into a "premium extras first"-mindset? When I see 2.7 being mentioned above (by the LLC), it gives me PEACE and COMFORT that my sites hopefully won't be in alpha stage functionality on the next upgrade. I'm not saying I don't want to contribute or have anything against MODX3. But if MODX3 holds a gun to my face and say come this way now and do nothing else, it's EVIL.
First of all, my posts here should be interpreted as coming from me personally, not as a spokesperson for the MODX3 project team. Agencies, individual contributors, and MODX LLC make up that collective, so I definitely do not speak on behalf of all of those
There is absolutely no "premium extras first" mindset in MODX3. If anything,
I've been advocating for the opposite by encouraging people to focus on the core experience when they reported issues that would affect third-party extras like ContentBlocks.
2.7 has been an intrinsic part of the MODX3 project, so that's nothing new.
I also don't see anyone holding a gun to your face about MODX3. Fred works on MODX3 too, so nobody is making you choose.
Quote from: mrhaw3. It is sad that a thread about FRED got hijacked to be a discussion about "modmore contentblocks" - is this how you want to advertise your product & services?
The majority of my
first post on this thread is in fact how I'd normally want to discuss my products. Someone asks a question about something that is closely related, worried about it being new and suitable for their project, so I point them to this other thing that happens to be my own product and try to explain to the best of my abilities the difference between said tools.
I'd say that's an on-topic response, and hopefully helpful to the @wyrdling or others coming across this topic at a later date. Personally, I also wouldn't label it as advertising but as a discussion on the merits of comparable tools, but I suppose as soon as there's a price tag involved in any one's proposal it does become more sales-y by definition.
That said, perhaps you're right and I should have stopped that post before the "I'm also frustrated..." paragraph introducing MODX3 to this topic. It is an honest answer to the question "What are your thoughts about Fred" and I stand by what I said, but it is not the type of answer that @wyrdling was looking for. That also led to a lot of other discussions in this thread that also didn't help to answer the real question at hand, so perhaps would've been better in a separate topic, but now here we are
Quote from: mrhaw at Jul 13, 2018, 07:46 AMLook at the replies here: https://twitter.com/mark_hamstra/status/1016411787032449027
MODX LLC has provided me with the best coding platform there is. These people are awesome developers and have provided me with awesome code. But they wouldn't exist to me, if it wasn't for MODX. And this PUBLIC crying is destroying the image of MODX and the community. It utterly sucks and need to stop.
What those replies tell me, is that I am not the only one that thinks the MODX LLC still has ways to go in getting their priorities and leadership of this community right, and that it is good to keep them
accountable for that publicly. But I am glad that you shared your thoughts as well, and public shaming is definitely not my goal.
I've also had private discussions with influential people in the community who echo those sentiments, but they do not want to go on the record saying that. Perhaps they are smarter than me...
I also owe a lot to the MODX project. My entire career and livelihood.
Quote from: mrhaw at Jul 13, 2018, 08:01 AMLike I said, I'm not sold on it. All I know is they are afraid of FRED, it might hurt their businesses...
I'm not afraid of Fred hurting my business. Yes, ContentBlocks is 50% of my license income. And I pay my monthly bills from my license income. I am in the very fortunate position that I don't have to take on freelance projects unless I want to or have big investments/expenses coming up. I owe all of that to the MODX community.
For me personally, this "side bet" puts the ability to spend time and money on things that make no commercial sense at risk. If ContentBlocks sales are to drop, I may be able of spending less time on things like...
- Developing fixes and new features for the MODX core as core contributor.
- Spending time on reviewing and merging patches as a core integrator, which has recently increased the workload as I am now, together with Jason (opengeek) a code owner, meaning one of us has to approve PRs or they can't be merged.
- Working on open source extras, of which I have about two dozen last I counted.
- Hosting 4 meetups per year,
including the one with most attendees at a meetup ever that cost me about €670. The MODX Weekend in 2014 made a loss of about €10k, and would have been canceled had I not been willing to invest license sales on getting the community in the same building for a weekend.
Even a commercial project like Commerce would not have gotten off the ground without ContentBlocks. If Fred hurts my license income significantly I'd have to spend more time on freelance work, probably, to make ends meet, but that's alright.
There's also a chance though that a positive scenario will play out here. If Fred indeed attracts new users to MODX or introduces more people to the concept of modular content, that could actually lead to more ContentBlocks sales. Only time will tell, and at the very least more competition and choice will be good for the users.
All that is to give you an idea of what the business aspect of this looks like to me. Yes, Fred has elevated my stress levels over the past week or two, but this is not a "life or death" situation from a business point of view, so I don't think my commercial interests are getting in the way of this discussion.
I would've called out the LLC for launching a "side bet" like Fred even if it hadn't competed with modmore in any way or form. Maybe they decided a workflow component was needed or a different manager theme. My problem is that they were offered the MODX3 project by Sterc, after years of them making promises about it, and decided to spend a lot of time on something else. There's a collaboration happening in the community unlike anything we've seen before, and they direct a very significant portion of their time elsewhere. That's the most disappointing part to me.
Interestingly, I probably would have actually been far less disappointing if the time they did spend on MODX3 was all the available time they had. If the 700 hours for Fred had gone into MODX Cloud or professional services work that helps them pay the bills, I would not have minded as much. Maybe that's hypocritical, but paying the bills is a big part of keeping something sustainable long-term, and I can totally respect that. But I do not see Fred contributing to their bottom line yet. So if they can pour that much effort into an open source extra with no immediate ROI, that means it was a management decision to allow that time to be spent on it, and not on MODX3. And spending time on something will always be a zero-sum game because you can only spend time once (unless they invented a time machine or cloning device, in which case I'd pay a lot of money to get access to that!)
For the MODX community, I sincerely hope that Ryan is right. I
need him to be right, as he is the CEO/Founder of the namesake company that, despite what I may think, people look to for guidance and leadership. If he says Fred will push the ecosystem of MODX forward, it will reflect badly on all of MODX if it does not. Fred has to succeed now that the LLC has decided it is part of the future.
Most importantly, we still have to all collaborate on the core. That's our shared interest and what everything else is built on, making it more important than any third party project, whether it's from modmore, the LLC, Sterc, or anyone else. That's why I think MODX3 is so much more important.
[ed. note: markh last edited this post 5 years, 9 months ago.]
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