Will ModX work for Butterfly?

Hi

I’ve been looking for a good CMS that will help me take my poral www.butterfly.co.ke to the next level. The CMS I’m using is closed source and rigid, and it’s an obstacle to keeping up with online developments.

My specific questions:

1. Butterfly is huge. It’s Yahoo! for Kenya. I read a review (http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/000405) that said ModX is limited to 5,000 documents per website. Given that my portal is a collection pf websites, and that our plan is to become as big as AOL, does this mean ModX is too ’small’ for my project?

2. I need assurance that ModX is here to stay. If it works for me, I will be more than happy to be a very active member of the ModX community. But I need to know that Butterfly won’t go down in March next year.

3. My portal is very features-intensive. What is live is hardly what we have behind the scenes. Our mail (mail.butterfly.co.ke) is in Java. We even have a WPMU blog (sikika.co.ke)! How easy is it to integrate different products on different platforms to this one CMS? Let me clarify, we don’t have to have the mail or blog running off ModX, but I need users to be able to stay signed in regardless of where they are on the portal.

4. Could you please respond to http://www.devtrench.com/things-that-suck-about-modx-cms/?

I am not going to directly address everything.

Some of what you are describing sounds like it would fit MODx revolution better than MODx Evolution.

Each domain would be in its own context...

Things that suck... After programming in 9 languages for over a decade, it boils down to this:

1) Every application is built according to the plan of the developers and therefore the users will need to think like the developers unless the devs decide to create a UI that caters to common usability
2) Every application has a learning curve
3) Every application requires enough foresight at the beginning to see if it is a solid foundation you can actually build on

I have built huge and very complex websites with MODX and simply will not waste time working with another application (though I have tested dozens).

1) If you’re building a project the scope of Yahoo.com, you should build a custom application. You’ll need dozens or hundreds of servers. What specific functions does Butterfly provide, because Yahoo! has a ton of stuff! 5000 docs is a soft recomendation based on our classic codebase and a mythical "typical" modest server configuration. Revo does not share the same caching architecture that created these recommendations and therefore that suggestion will change in the future.

2) We definitely not going anywhere anytime soon. Lots more on that soon, but suffice it to say you’ll likely be safe for the next decade or so ...

3) You can use Revo with custom authentication. Here’s a start for one approach: http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,7501.msg274863

4) Why not let the author of the article respond himself: http://www.devtrench.com/modx-sucks/ ... also we already did via the comments on that article and the follow-up

I’ll respond since I wrote the ’MODx Sucks’ post.

Most of the things I wrote about in my post still stand for the Evolution codebase. Membership is still the thing i struggle with the most when I have clients that want granular control over who can edit what (some have even requested it at the template variable level), but I’ve really gotten into the code more and am a bit more forgiving about calling it a framework. I do think that the Pros for MODx outweigh the Cons by far. It’s easy to use, easy to develop for, etc.

I’ve developed sites with thousands of pages in MODx and there’s about a 1000-2000 page limit I hit with wayfinder. It just takes too long to recursively build the menu. The snippet could be refactored to use arrays instead of calling the database at every recursion to make it faster, but I’m not going to do it.

The only other slowness or limit that I’ve encountered is when opening a folder in the manager menu that has thousands of pages in it.

Other than that, MODx seems quite snappy to me and is a great CMS. It is not however, Yahoo. You should be looking into custom development with a framework like Symfony (symfony-project.com). I build all my clients websites with MODx because it’s fast and works well, but I don’t know that MODx was built to be scaleable the way Yahoo, Facebook, AOL, etc are. When I need to build custom applications that need to scale I use Symfony because it’s been proven to scale well in multiple server environments.

It’s possible that the Revolution codebase could suit your needs, but in my opinion it’s too early to tell, and I still think you’d be better off writing your own custom code.

James

I’m thrilled to read all your responses, and within 24 hours!

I will definitely look at your suggestions with help from my technical teams.

Thanks a lot

http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,36714.0.html