I decided to start the year off on my blog with interviews with some of the MODx team who fortunately have agreed to indulge me and answer some of my questions
. The first interview, with Shaun McCormick, is up on my blog and is a pretty interesting read. Here’s a section of it:
1. Hi Shaun, most of us who are members of the MODx community know you better as splittingred (your MODx forums username). Can you tell us a bit about yourself?
Hi, I work for Collabpad, the company behind MODx, and work from home in Austin, Texas (the best city in the US). I love my wife Jamie, Jesus, playing any instrument I can get my hands on, audio recording, chess, poker, my church Hope in the City, and fruit snacks. I am also always up for a good game of basketball, even though I will usually lose. Did I mention I love fruit snacks?
2. What is your development background? When did you start programming, what languages have you worked with?
I’ve been in the web development industry for over ten years, and I specialize in UI framework development. I started in webdev when I discovered the internet via CompuServe, and nearly immediately wanted to know how I could create web pages that anyone from anywhere could see. Diving into PHP at its PHP/FI beginnings, I’ve been programming with it since, and have expanded my language knowledge to JavaScript, Java, CSS, SQL, Python, Perl, C++, Cocoa, ColdFusion, XML and even some old-style C from time to time.
3. How did you get involved with the MODx project? Have you worked with other CMS/F projects before?
I got involved with MODx after using it at the College of Education at UT to deploy their main website. I had evaluated all of the major CMS systems, and found MODx to simply be the most flexible, extensible system out of all of them. Knowing that the college was going to want a lot of customizations, MODx was an easy choice. From there, I felt I could contribute to MODx development, and from there got involved with the project by bugging Ryan and Jason for commit access to fix bugs. Tackling MODx’s FlySpray (the bugtracker at the time) became a bit of a hobby, and the MODx crew invited me on after that.
Soon after that I got further involved by working with Jason on xPDO and 0.9.7 – or what would become MODx Revolution 2.0. I proposed redoing the admin UI, and incorporating ExtJS to enhance the usability. I soon after left UT and was hired by Collabpad. Since then, I’ve had a blast doing all kinds of xPDO/MODx work, and particularly enjoy working on community developer involvement, writing the official documentation, the Package Management system for Revo, and a pet project of mine: Discuss, a native forum for Revolution.
4. What do you see as the strengths of MODx on its own and when compared to other CMS/Fs?
Flexibility combined with outright power. MODx’s fundamentals far outshine any of the rest, especially now with the xPDO core in Revolution. I also think most people vastly underestimate the power of Template Variables until they get more familiar with MODx. They simply rock. Plus, for me, the idea of Chunks and Snippets made sense once I familiarized myself with the terminology – it felt more like true MVC for a CMS than other solutions have offered.
The tree-based navigation on the left was a big selling point for me. And templating where I could just plug in HTML and CSS…why other CMS’s hadn’t figured that one out yet boggled me.
5. MODx has often been considered as being not beginner-friendly because it’s not as plug-and-play as other CMSs. Do you agree? Do you view this as a strength or a weakness or both?
I think it depends on what you mean by “plug-and-play”. It’s not a one-stop shop like Joomla or Drupal; however, it offers far more flexibility and ease of use if you want to create a simple non-blog site, such as a marketing site. Customization is far easier in MODx – simple “templated” solutions are easier on other systems. Those type of people – ones who want to install a CMS and barely do any customizing – are not MODx’s target audience.
To answer your question, it’s a strength and/or a weakness. It just depends on who you are to properly define which.
You can read the full interview at
http://codingpad.maryspad.com/2010/01/05/interview-with-shaun-mccormick-mod/
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