Switching from Evo to Revo and trying to understand workflow...

After spending nearly the last 5 years using MODx Evo for all my projects, I finally decided after MODx Revo 2.1 came out I’d jump over to Revo. I just began a project with Revo today and I guess what shocked me was the speed of the Manager area. The reload time was several seconds which can be an infinity when working with a large amount of resources that need to be edited quickly. Having use Evo for years, I was used to flying around the manager making changes very quickly. I’m finding the left hand tree structure has to reload everytime a small change is made which is a bit time consuming. I’m working on a VPS from Liquid Web. I’ve got FIOS internet which is blazing fast, so I don’t think it’s the connection or my server being unresponsive.

I guess my question is this: "Am I misunderstanding the workflow of Revo?" I ask b/c it seems to be very sluggish. Please don’t misunderstand my statement as a criticism, but more of my not understanding the slow speed of Revo’s interface and wandering what I’m doing wrong. I am used to taking a PSD file from a client, knocking out the HTML in the morning and putting it into Evo in the afternoon. I just did a project in Revo and due to it’s speed issue, I had to scrap the Revo install and move it over to Evo. Trying to do this particular project in Revo just was not going to work in the time I was used to with Evo and it’s fast speed in the Manager. After this happened my assumption is that I must be doing things the wrong way with Revo. I was doing things the way I used to with Evo. Does anyone have suggested docs or blog postings for working efficiently in Revo (if the article had any comparison’s to working with Evo, that’d be a plus) in relation to the manager which seems to be slow?

Thanks!

It is sluggish. That’s a common complaint. From watching the forums it appears a bit fragile as well, but then I’ve always had that impression of extJS, not to mention that you have Smarty stuffed in there somewhere as well. Those are a couple of the reasons I haven’t switched. I’ve long been a firm proponent of the KISS principle.

It is sluggish. That’s a common complaint. From watching the forums it appears a bit fragile as well, but then I’ve always had that impression of extJS, not to mention that you have Smarty stuffed in there somewhere as well. Those are a couple of the reasons I haven’t switched. I’ve long been a firm proponent of the KISS principle.

Hey Susan,

Thanks for your response. I found this posting from 18 months ago:

http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,42096.msg253051.html

After reading the posting from that long ago, I guess I’m wondering why this manager issue is still unresolved. It seems the community would have been upset if this was really a big issue and forced it to be fixed, which leads me to the same question: is there a way of working with the Manager area in Revo that I’m just not understanding?

I guess my concern at this time is the direction of MODx. Evo is simple, light-weight and super fast. 98% of my business deals with projects that are primarily brochure sites that allow clients to show off their company or small Ecommerce sites that I integrate with Foxy Cart. They may only need blog or news feeds, photo galleries or other simple functionalities and I find Revo to be overkill for those projects. I’m not a programmer at all, but I’ve been able to build awesome sites through Evo over the years and given my clients what they want. I found Revo to be just too slow to be practical. Maybe Revo is not what I need? I think many hardcore developers may love it b/c of it’s ability to grow and scale, but that’s not what my clients need.

Again, not to be critical of Revo. I’m willing to accept that maybe there’s something I’m entirely missing, but it’s just not delivering the solution I need for my clients nor for my business. I’d stick with Evo, but I have to think long-term. In 2 or 3 years from now, will it even be supported at all? I have to think security at that point. Will my Evo sites be vulnerable b/c it no longer will be updated? I’m at the point that in the next 2 to 3 months, I have to find a CMS for my company and I’m really wanting to stick with MODx b/c it’s been just an amazing system. But with Revo being the new direction of MODx, unless the manager area speed issue is resolved, it’s really not an option for my clients.

Hi Flinx,

I just read that old post you linked to, and towards the end of the thread, Bob ends up agreeing: "About Evo, I just checked and you’re absolutly right. The page saves in Revo take about half the time they do in Evo."

I worked in Evo first as well, and when I switched over my immediate reaction was that Revo was slow. But as I started to use it more, that feeling went away so that now when I go back to a client’s Evo site, I don’t notice a speed difference, but rather that there’s stuff Evo can’t do

The only way Evo will ever become unsupported is if enough people say, and enough people believe, that it will be and drop it, in which case eventually it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. For my part, I’ll be using Evo and working on it until I can’t see the screen well enough to do anything on the computer any more. I’ve got some plans for cleaning up, simplifying and reorganizing the back-end as well, including better integration of web users and the whole TV subsystem, as soon as I get a few other distractions in my life taken care of. I’m happy with a nice little Mercedes convertible, I don’t have much need for a bus.

http://www.mbusa.com/mercedes/vehicles/explore/overview/class-E/model-E350A
http://www2.mercedes-benz.co.uk/content/unitedkingdom/mpc/mpc_unitedkingdom_website/en/home_mpc/bus.html

Susan, I love you

+ 1 forever Evo user...

as i’ve said somewhere else here, i’m even ready to start a php5 fork of Evo if i felt it threatened... (would be an opportunity to upgrade the manager with mootools 1.3 or 2, depends on when this happens )

my last one with Evo
http://www.crma.fr
YAMS, 11 modules (php5 object written, each of them integrated like a breeze in the manager), many snippets of course, custom TVs, auto completion search, well, can’t see what more i can ask a cmf

Evo FTW !

Have swing

One saving grace in the Revo Manager is the "Quick Update" feature available from the right-click menu in the Resource tree. It allows you to edit just about anything without leaving your current work. That saves me a lot of time, which helps make up for the sometimes sluggish response times. Being able to clear the cache without leaving your work also helps a lot.

Hey sepiariver,

Thanks for the response. Again, by no means am I trying to be argumentative, but I can’t find an example when using Revo where it’s not slow. I do realize Revo probably has much more advanced functionality (no dispute there), but my concern is the sacrifice of speed with new functionality. I’m going to take a turn at it again, but in a testing environment where I can play around with it localhost when I’m not under a time sensitive deadline.

Susan, you’re right. I don’t need a bus. A "small" convertible has served me just fine over the years and I pray that it continues to be supported as it’s all I need for my company.

Hi all,

Just a small message about the back-end speed of Revo: you might want to wait 2.2.x branch, since it seems there’s a lot of speed improvements (especially on-the-fly JS/CSS minification). But i now it’s always "hard" to make the switch to another tool once you already are used to a good tool. Albeit it took me some times to get used to Revo, i’m now much more used to Revo & won’t be able to switch back to Evo…
But as usual, as long as you are fine with one tool, why changing it ?

Quote from: flinx at Jun 16, 2011, 12:51 AM

I don’t need a bus. A "small" convertible has served me just fine over the years and I pray that it continues to be supported as it’s all I need for my company.

I’m certain that MODX Evolution will be supported in many years to come. If the core team would eventually decide to stop supporting Evolution there are many active community members that can and will support Evolution as long as they are actively using it. For now I use Evolution for all small-midsize projects and Revolution only for big/complex custom projects. Also too many of my clients still have web hosters that don’t even support all the requirements for Revolution.

I will certainly make the change for Revolution in some day but until then I’ll wait for speedier manager and robust front-end editing solution. Luckily the web browsers and computers are steadily getting faster, so expect that the speed issues will evetually fade away.