Evo or Revo?

Hi All,

It has just been three days and I feel that some of my wishes are coming true

First of all, after less than a week of use, I like it more and more and now I find it hard to go back to Evo. Same feeling among my users after the initial complains they feel that they can work better in Revo.

- The lack of any pre-installed packages. Wayfinder, ditto, TinyMCE or forms are expected to be there (ok, at least by me) and I think it will just frustrate me to have to go through the boring process of installing them for every site.

We did this for a few reasons:
1. It prevents people from thinking those Extras are "part of the MODx core". They’re not, and we want that easily understood.
2. Not everyone wants the same Extras. Removing them removes cruft.
3. They’re ridiculously easy to install. Furthermore, you can use the PackMan Extra to create a Package that has all the Extras in it you want as subpackages. Then it’s a 1-click install of all your Extras.

Fair enough, the package manager is very easy to use and works much better than browsing the web site. I love it. But I have a suggestion to make:
It would be nice if, right after the basic installation to either get redirected to the package manager page with some suggestions or have a page with some common package. For all the experienced users this has little to offer since we know what we are looking for, but any user that first installs a CMS that they are not familiar with it may find it easier if they are presented with some of the most common packages. I remember back when I Revo was beta and made my choice to use Evo, this has been done almost exclusively because the Evo asked me to install the sample site which was my "quick start guide" to modx.

This is already done in 2.0.5: http://splittingred.com/assets/images/policy/

This looks great, Thanks!

Good idea, but what would those policy templates be? How would they be implemented? Any suggestions?

I will have to understand better the permission system, I will be happy to share what are my usual policy sets.

Also after disabling some of the stuff in the home page, the login is faster, thanks for the advice.

The last part was the QuickManager, I read the contributor’s post and it was very encouraging.

Thank you all for the attention and the responses.

Hi All, I am replying to this thread beacause it seems fairly active and I think it is appropriate to my situation.

I am currently working on a small site, I have done a few sites with EVO in the past but lately I have been doing a fair bit of programming with the Yii framework.

I thought I would give REVO a try and mostly everything has been going well. I like to develop a site as much as possible locally and then deploy it to a server. This was my first glitch. I FTP’d all my files to the server and then I had to change a lot of path’s and urls in a text file (I forget exactly what file but it was called config.inc.php). After doing this the front end of the site works ok. But now the manager does not open. I looked at the /manager/index.php file and put a few test statements , echoing paths etc followed by a die; to see where the thing was bailing.

I seem to have the paths correct, it is creating a modx object but after this statement.
$modx->getRequest();
I can no longer output anything, I assume that it is not returning to this point.

Are there other files that need to be changed for the manager?

It seems like an awesome application but I am pretty lost right now.
thanks.
doodle

Did you run setup on the new site? It will preserve your content if the "Upgrade" box is checked. It’s semi-mandatory after moving a site to straighten out all the paths.

Also, delete the contents of the core/cache directory.

If that’s not it, it likely that either:

1. One or more files was corrupted in the transfer to the new site (it happens more often than you might think).
2. Your FTP program failed to overwrite one or more existing files.

Thanks Bob, I’ll check that out asap and let you know.

doodle

Quote from: smashingred at Sep 01, 2010, 06:41 AM

MIkhaell,

Revolution is heaver by necessity than Evo regardless of its use of JS because it is significantly more powerful. We’ll be continually improving performance and as well, you will soon see 3rd party editions of the Manager UI built on pure HTML/CSS. The ExtJs based manager has advantages that can speed up development too like drag and drop and pagination etc. the ability to drag elements onto resources and fill in fields, auto-population of fields without page reloads. @splittingred has already committed speed improvements to resource saves and we’ll make it faster at every turn. It may never be as nimble as our little Evo but it will always get better. Thanks for sharing.

After trying out Revo a few months ago this was a big factor in me staying with Evo. The numerous small ajax requests incurred too much of a time overhead compared to Evo’s non-ajaxy interface.

It wasn’t the only issue though, and more fundamentally I would only switch if Revo offered an overall and significant advantage over Evo for my own work. At the moment it doesn’t.

As I see it, Evo’s minus points - from a personal point of view - are...

• Cached/uncached nested snippets. This was a welcome change and initially got a big thumbs up from for Revo. However after a reality check in this area it occurs to me now that I’ve been surviving quite well with this problem. It hasn’t resulted in any sites suffering as a result. It was a big pain when I started with MODx, and clearly something that needed sorting due to the amount of confusion it causes to newbies, but from my own personal point of view it really doesn’t matter that much anymore.
• 5000 page limit. I have written some medium size sites but have yet to have 5000 pages on a site. As such, I can in general live with this. I did once quote on a job where it could have been an issue (and hence considered either Revo or purely bespoke coding), but even then it wasn’t clear cut.
• I used to wish chunks could take parameters and I gather they now can although I never tried this out. I like this, but am slightly cautious about developing bad habits in terms of mixing templating and logic.
• Its annoying saving a long piece of code only to be put back at the start of the snippet. Chances are I’m about to test what I’ve just changed and will be needing to go back there again. On the other hand its not that big a deal as most of the time I edit code in a text editor locally, and paste it in to the manager on each update.

When all is said and done, none of these issues would make me dump Evo. If I was new to MODx, the first one would be a problem, but not the others - and on balance I would still prefer Evo.

Perhaps I’ll have another look at Revo further down the line. If a w3c standards compliant non-ajaxy manager was developed that would be a big plus point to me, but still I have that niggling feeling that I would be looking at Revo not because it is ’better’ or more ’powerful’, but because people have said its ’better’ and more ’powerful’.

Its not just a case of ironing out any problems with Revo. I’m used to Evo, and am happy with it. As a developer/coder who is familiar with Evo’s API and the db stricture, I’m really wondering what the killer feature could be that would make me want to incur the time overheads of switching?

-- Tim.

For the most part I’m in tge same boat as TimGS right now. Anxious to hear responses.

5000 page limit. I have written some medium size sites but have yet to have 5000 pages on a site.

there’s still a limit to resources in revo. if you are using more than a couple of hundred resources for the same kind of "posts", you’re advised to use CMPs in Revo.
http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,56823.msg327269.html#msg327269

Quote from: sharkbait at Jan 08, 2011, 10:44 PM

5000 page limit. I have written some medium size sites but have yet to have 5000 pages on a site.

there’s still a limit to resources in revo. if you are using more than a couple of hundred resources for the same kind of "posts", you’re advised to use CMPs in Revo.
http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,56823.msg327269.html#msg327269

Thanks for that. Interesting reading as regards using resources for data versus custom tables.

This issue was the only reason I have ever considered Revo for a commercial site. After reading the above thread, for that particular job, I don’t think I’d be any better off.

-- Tim.

This will be true in any CMS, though the amount of overhead will vary.

If you want to see just how much extra overhead you’re lugging around using resources to show blog posts, comments, individual items for sale in an e-commerce site, or anything else that has only a handful of fields that you actually need, try previewing a page with this snippet:

As I see it, there are two issues here which could but should not get confused.

Improved caching options - goodbye 5000 page limit, hello any caching system you so desire to implement. This makes MODx an even better candidate for larger sites with lots of traffic. Also, any Element can now be specified to be treated as a cached or non-cached. There’s even a clean path to completely override the default caching system to implement large-scale caching code like memcached. (1)

This is what has been said in the past about Revolution - and regardless of what the pages are used for, is this statement correct for the current release of Revo? I appreciate this may not be a simple yes/no answer.

I also am not going to criticise anyone for not implementing an infinitely scalable system - but I am looking for accurate information.

The second issue, as I see it - whether to use the document/resources as holders for information or as ’view’s is another matter, related but separate. I think it fair to say there are different points of view here (which could probably occupy a thread in themselves). I am inclined to lean towards the view put forward in http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,18872.msg296755.html#msg296755 in some situations and lean towards custom db tables in others. However thats up to our own judgement as developers, and as much as is practically possible I’m after the flexibility to do either. To make such judgements we need to know just what the answer is to the first question above - which directly affects the question as to whether to use Evo, Revo or neither!

-- Tim.


(1) Thats from the google cache of a Revo release announcement (the page in question appears to have been deleted)