Evo or Revo?

Thanks all for responding.

BobRay - Evo 1.0.6 in the near future - that is music to my ears! I guess just for that security update. I wonder how much longer it will be supported?

Sottwell - I am with you. I much prefer Evo. I have just started playing with Revo for the second time but I much prefer Evo. Obviously I am new to Revo but Evo just works straight out of the box - and it seems quicker to make / deploy / move a site. The MODxLite concept gets my vote.

In Revo I do like installing packages through the Manager (when it works) - and having the elements etc in the LHS tree. That is nice. Everything else is Evo all the way for mine.

Once I got a handle on building a site with Evo (I am not a coder so it took me a while) I felt no need to explore another CMS. Evo is incredible and such a winning, user friendly and efficient formula. Now with Revo taking over and the potential for Evo support ceasing at some point, I am not sure if it is time to explore new avenues while I am back to square one.

The inbuilt "ManagerManager" equivalent in Revo feels a bit convoluted and awkward - something that in Evo with text in a chunk is a piece of cake to use:

"I'm just starting a new site in Evo because it has everything I need for this particular site. And it just feels a lot more light weight (in a good way) in terms of code and effort."

I know exactly what you mean thingstodo. I am concerned in keeping on using it if it is slowly becoming obsolete. That's what I am unsure about.

I love change, I just love Evo more. [ed. note: nickf08 last edited this post 14 years, 7 months ago.]

I hate change, but I much prefer working in Revo. YMMV.


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PLEASE, PLEASE specify the version of MODX you are using . . . PLEASE!
MODX info for everyone: http://bobsguides.com/modx.html

Revo is indeed an impressive piece of software engineering. My main purpose in working with Revo is to get a good understanding of some of its more interesting features, and to then consider how best to backport the features, while not their actual implementation in code, to a simplified more modular Evo. The whole purpose will be to tighten it up into a lighter, quicker, even more modular and flexible system. It won't have the sheer power of Revo, but then again it won't be as heavy on resources nor as fragile. To use a car analogy that I've used before, a Mercedes convertible vs a Mercedes bus.

Agreed sottwell. I am a non coder but can certainly appreciate the clever programming and ajax in Revo. Spinning, shiny things always look nicer.

Backporting to a more modular Evo is interesting, An improved Evo is where I would have thought improvements would have gone in the first place. I am not sure what was so wrong with Evo to totally replace it.

Mercedes convertible sounds nice to me.

ps I LOVE the new MODx logo on this site and that comes with Revo - it is FANTASTIC!

While I find the UI in Revo much quicker to navigate through (and I use Quick Update a lot), the main reason I like it is the cleaner architecture. It's infinitely easier for me to create a new extra in Revo. For anything more complex than a simple snippet, I think I can do an extra in Revo in about 1/4 the time (or less) that it would take me to do the same thing in Evo.

Once Revo settles down, I think it will be very robust, but I do think that the extreme modularization of everything (with many files containing only a couple of lines of code) has slowed things down some. I wouldn't be surprised to see some consolidation of classes to make it perform a little better.


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PLEASE, PLEASE specify the version of MODX you are using . . . PLEASE!
MODX info for everyone: http://bobsguides.com/modx.html

I've been evaluating several CMS packages this week to replace a simple site I had built with Revo. I looked at the ones recommended as 'Best CMS for designers' and I was impressed at how well Evo holds up against more lauded packages; in most cases Evo was far superior. [ed. note: randall last edited this post 14 years, 7 months ago.]

I see where you are coming from BobRay, that does sound more efficient in your case. I am a non coder so creating extras doesn't happen unless I call in the big guns.

@ Randall. Thanks for the input, I am coming from a css / designer angle too. Was EVO the clear winner for you or was there another CMS that took out the honours in your evaluations?

Yes Evo was the clear winner much to my surprise because given the hype some CMS get I was expecting Evo to have been left behind by now. I appreciate designers want simplicity but some CMS take that approach way too far, in contrast the back-end of Evo strikes a very good balance IMO.

One of the few areas Evo loses to its competitors is if you require social media login and commenting; as far as I know there is no snippet to do that and Jot certainly doesn't allow third party comments. But in all other areas Evo takes some beating.

It would be nice to have something similar to MIGX and a better caching system for MODX Evolution, for example if I want to build a mobile website with a plugin, I need to make all pages uncached, which is not ideal. Anyway, I still prefer to work with it because it is so simple to configure/move a website with it.

I have some troubles with Form Customization/Permissions on Revolution, it took me a lot of time to move the template variables in tabs and order them as I wanted, in Evolution I would have done the same in 10 minutes with MM.

Hi,

first, thanks to nickf08 for the evo 1.06 question... i've been asking this here and there with no answer for a while

now, just my two cents in this interesting discussion
i've been using evo for a while, have made quite a lot of website with it and will continue to do so, even if evo were due to be left behind by the team (as i said once, i'm in the starting blocks to make my own php5 oo fork of evo with a mootools 1.4 upgrade of the manager if this happened, Susan ? )

in the meantime, i install and try every single Revo release and, so far, even if some new concepts are really interesting, for many reasons, i'm sorry to say that Evo is still the winner for me...
- performance, i can't get enough of my clients being so stuck by how fast their websites are, when, on my local server, i'm stuck by how slow a simple page with no css, no js but just a content var is rendered in revo (Bob is probably right, this will sure change in a near future)
to be honest, this is particularly true with multilingual websites, but, i compare Evo + Yams with Revo + Babel as being French, most the websites i make are multilingual
- extending, well, i mustn't have read bob's book enough probably as, personally, i feel installing modules in evo (every single one being php5 oo written) so much simpler than the manager custom pages in revo
- manager, well, here, revo is the clear winner (except for speed but this is improving fast), design and simplicity are really great in revo
- js, well kind of an personal allergy to ext dojo or mootools (i do love oo javascript...) would have done the trick but well, personal and irrelevant then
and so on... (without speaking of xPDO, i love the pdo part but, god, why xml, why not json or, better, a php config object like in Yii, well, yes, pPDO sounds weird i admit ?)

this being said, i will keep trying revo releases until one makes me think "here we are, it's better than evo", this may happen if Revo had the few features i miss in evo, build in multilanguage support, versionning and workflow
till then i can't see why i would have slower websites when i still haven't hit the wall that says "i can't do this in evo but i can in revo" and, believe me, i've done pretty complicated things in evo with complex user management, software interfacing and so on, the only times i feel evo is not the right solution for me are when a frameworks seems a better one, not another cms, that's to say when it's more about web application than website (event if i also have a evo made website with framework build application aside... this works too and interface with evo like a breeze)

have swing