My own personal version of it:
About a year ago, the sum total of my web design experience consisted of, er, two sophomoric Geocities sites (one, I should say, written in HTML/CSS with notepad rather than with that infamous wysiwyg editor). I was then roped into designing a large and unwieldy political website on the basis that I was the last fellow available who was generally 'good at computers'. It was already about a quarter done, by somebody who does this for a living and was generously helping us out pro bono, and who uses Evo. So I had to learn it double-quick.
On tuesday night, after several false starts and plenty of inane questions from muggins here on this very forum, the beast finally went live. In the meantime, I've been playing around with Revo, knocking up a personal website/blog (which currently sits, out of view, on my hard drive) and using it to play around with JQuery and such in a 'controlled environment'.
On the basis of that experience, I will be using Revo in future. Perhaps I'd have come out on the other side of the fence, had I been doing the big old daunting project on Revo and the fun-time thing on Evo. But I don't think so - I've learned enough to know that much of the most useful functionality in Evo - one thinks of PHx - is jerry-rigged by ingenious developers into that platform, but integrated into the core of Revo; and that the latter's interface, complaints about speed notwithstanding (I've never noticed a difference, personally), is much slicker and more usable (I was getting rather pissed off at having to click on the chunks tab every four seconds because of the way the elements page works, for example).
Future proofing I think is ultimately not the issue - enough people, clearly, are Evo loyalists to keep that going, even if the 'resurrection' is in its early stages. The important thing for ModX, if it's going to REALLY make it big, is to attract people like I was a year ago, who don't know much of the 'hard' techie stuff but still want to have proper control over how the damn thing looks and works, without being slung into a wordpress-style straitjacket. Nowadays, when literally everyone has some basic level of computer literacy at least, I suspect there's quite a lot of us ;-) Revo, being generally slicker, is off to a better start on that point.
Anyway, for giving me the chance to make something big, and passably eye catching, without having to know more PHP than would fill half a side of A4 paper, I have fallen in love with ModX, and would rather not have to use any other CMS in future. Looking forward to number three.
☆ A M B ☆
