Hi there,
Only just stumbled on this topic - some great discussion and it seems like a pretty critical topic.
Chris - not sure if you’re still tracking this thread but I’d be interested to know which way your company went in the end? For myself the main factors that convince me the project will still be around in years to come are the strong cohesive group of talented core developers, the strength of the community (which in itself is a reflection on the core group) but also the quality of MODx as a product - its flexibility and utility. It’s not easy for a CMS project to rise to prominence these days (there are many hundreds of them out there) but judging by indicators such as the Packt awards then that’s just what MODx has done. Additionally, MODx Revolution is an indication that the product is here to stay and become stronger and is an expression of significant investment by the core group (thanks guys).
Ryan’s comment about being the ’Red Hat of MODx [CMS] world’ seems like it could be key to the largest part of income generation. Roughneck mentioned SilverStripe and I think it’s an interesting case to study. Being a New Zealander myself I’ve been keeping a keen eye on the project. SilverStripe was a commercial product that was later rewritten as Open Source and is a similar mix of CMS/CMF as MODx (IMO). The ’parent’ company is now the 37th fastest growing companies in the country. Most of that income seems to be based on their services - either directly using the product on paid projects or supplying project management, support services (ongoing site maintenance etc.) paid coding for one-off problem solving - either directly for clients or sub-contracting for web designer/developers and other design/dev companies), mentoring for individuals and organisations using the product and so on. Of course you have to be careful in the way you offer that and I note your original point Chrism101 about your company not being happy about the position now held by Acquia. It’s interesting to me that SilverStripe on their services page
http://silverstripe.com/services/ put Website Development right at the end of their services offering - and I don’t think that’s an accident.
Of course SilverStripe have chosen to release under Free BSD license rather than GPL - and I’m sure this is one aspect that’s affected the whole ’ecosystem’ surrounding the product. I’d be interesting to see more on the point raised by the core team that they’re considering other licensing models as well as GPL. Don’t get me wrong - I love the GPL; I think it’s not just one of the most significant contributions to software but also beyond that to society as a whole...
SilverStripe also have an official partner program which I’d see as something MODx could do? It could possibly be tied to some sort of accreditation as a MODx developer? So you could have a top-tier of users/companies paying a fee each year or as a one-off to be accredited as MODx design/dev shops and listed in a directory a bit like you do with the sponsors at present? I know there’s other models for this amongst other CMS/CMF. ExpressionEngine folk are looking at this right now...
I can see where you’re going with the premium plugins - it would be wonderful to see some of those hidden projects come to life and if some sort of fee could do that. But as has been pointed out, it seems a tricky route to take. I’ve used ExpressionEngine quite a bit and it’s been interesting to see what’s happened there - a lot of the really good add-ons were originally free but have now become commercial. You don’t get the previous version being released as a free version as each one is upgraded so the paid-for components (some of which are pretty much central to most of my projects) move further and further ahead of the free ones (IMO). The paid components are of high quality and come with support and it’s allowed some of those developers to make a living... but one result is that I don’t see EE getting a fraction of installations of say WP, Drupal etc. The numbers game isn’t all but I think it’s pretty important. Plus it means that it’s becoming less and less attractive for certain types of project I do (for non-profits and voluntary organisations for example - especially since Ellislab used to offer a free core product to those types of organisations that seems to be being phased out with the next release of the product). Another aspect is that MODx might suddenly be compared with a whole different class of products when people were looking for solutions... (not necessarily good or bad but I’m just noting...)
Could MODx qualify for grants like Google Summer of Code to push some ideas forward - and would that be seen as useful? Seems to me grants are more attractive than ’venture capital’ like funding since that can often pull a project out of shape depending on the funder’s motives etc.
Schwag would be welcome - but I don’t see it bringing in the sort of income required to support the tremendous amount of work that’s brought to a project like this by the main contributors (as has already been alluded to). Be interesting to know if the core team logged the time on Revolution alone... probably be pretty shocking to know just how much time that amounts to
All the users of MODx contributing $10 might provide some ’seed’ funding for pushing a few things forward but it seems like long-term the project needs to be looking at a model which generates quite a bit of income? Of course all those commenting here have probably effectively donated a lot more than $10 to the project in time alone... I see folk like mrhaw and Mary over on Coding Pad making sizable contributions on a daily basis (I’m only mentioning them specifically since I know them a bit better than the rest of you but also know there’s a small army of others you get to see here and other places making contributions on a daily basis).
I’ve bought the MODx book and contributed financially to tutorials on MODx - personally I’d like to see some sort of ’cookbook’ for MODx and would pay for that. I don’t see it as becoming prescriptive in the way mrhaw was concerned about. But I’d agree if MODx ever became like Joomla then I’d be the first to jump ship
But I’d just like to see how other people have assembled solutions to particular challenges (not really that far from tutorial sites already out there). Also, I don’t see this as threatening the core documentation but again would only see income like this bringing in relatively moderate income especially in relation to the work required to assemble resources such as these. Mary over at Coding Pad made the point that assembling those tutorials takes a chunk of time and few people take the opportunity to donate...
Seems like a good time to have this discussion - products like Drupal and WordPress are steadily developing and looking to corner large areas of the CMS market and new areas of the CMF market (both are developing aspects of CMF that make MODx such a great solution). SilverStripe and ExpressionEngine 2.0 both have close coupling with rapid development PHP frameworks so I’m sure many see them as direct competition. Both of those frameworks are very flexible and also support modern standards (CodeIgniter has just announce it’s going fully PHP5 from now on - discussion elsewhere on these forums on that subject). Sapphire looks like a neat framework with all the right ’buzzwords’ agile, MVC, OO, ORM, Ajax friendly etc. IMO they both also have great communities. I’m not making an argument for them being ’better’ or even the same but if we’re to help keep MODx up there alongside or ahead of them then we collectively need to work out how to keep MODx/Collabpad very healthy and permit code contributors to extract income from those contributions (IMO).
Apologies for the VERY long and rather late posting on the subject - just been thinking about this for a while... possibly should have just posted a blog item and linked here. But hopefully my contribution is still useful on this subject.
MODX Staff
I’m not familiar with the story/history of WPMU though, so some insight there to avoid a similar lesson would be quite valuable to share if you don’t mind.
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But there are different tiers of users, and I personally wouldn’t like the poor ones (or those who cannot pay, for other reasons) to be booted out and ending up getting only mediocre or below mediocre stuff.
