A rant about design and CMS

I hope this is the right place to post this, and it is a bit of a rant.....from a lone designer’s perspective.

First off some of you know that I have just jumped on the Modx bandwagon (there has been a bit of a learning curve) and I have found myself asking tons of truly idiotic questions but, what has me becoming more and more of a modx militant is it’s logic. Now many people may find themselves in camps of different CMSs becoming almost irrationally fanatical about their choices, we have to deploy on Joomla! we HAVE to use Drupal! etc etc, but I don’t think I am being this way with Modx.

As a designer there is no choice whatsoever, there really isn’t, I don’t care about the particulars of a certain CMS, unless it allows me to get the darn job done! My only qualms against Drupal (Just Using Drupal as an example, don’t get upset) is: why do I have to create themes that can break from version to version? why is the PHP an integral part of the design? By this, I mean, really what does it have to do with a floated div, the z-index rather than just the usability features of the various modules and core itself? etc etc. Why do I have to go through file after file to design a form? Why do I have to upgrade to another adobe CS offering to have the ability now to tweak a CMS’s CSS via a wysiwyg? why do I have to have an .info file among ten others instead of one xhtml and one css file? why?! why!? why!?

This I am sure has been gone over and over here, but I love how Modx says: "ok man you just created a beautiful design (at least you think so) and you know where you want everything to go, you have CSS ready for forms and every little aspect of your site ready to go and it looks nice from IE6 to Konqueror. Ok now spend five minutes getting your CMS to look the way you envisioned it."

The only drawback, and I do mean only, is I can already see problems for me when Revo hits the proverbial shelves: key extras won’t be supported, in my case it will be PE weblogin, (which I think is fantastic). There is going to have to be a need to keep key extras current with Modx, of course this is a part of Drupal’s problem as well, once a designer becomes too dependent on modules they soon find themselves in hell trying to keep their sites updated or even worse, the kind coder who maintained it suddenly find themselves with a 9 to 5 for a big firm and a family to take care of, their time becomes extremely limited and development of the modules slows or even stops. A case in point is TE mailer, it almost worked for me, but there seems to be one nice guy trying to keep it alive, and I’ll be darned if I have to shell out money to cut and past some newletter management company’s code into a sidebar so I could send out only a few newsletters to clients each month, I’d much rather pay the guys at Modx to keep it going.

Some will say; "well as Modx becomes more mainstream you will see more development for it." well yes, but that then creates the same nightmare faced by our design brothers and sisters who are dependent on Drupal, there is simply too much.

I have been already thinking about scenarios, what if I get this type of client? what if I am approached by someone who needs..."

Modx needs to make money and at the same time remaining opensource and manageable in order for it to push forward, there are Redhat’s blueprint: money from support (I believe that is already in place here, not sure), Novell’s: money from SLED and SLES while offering openSuSE, and even Drupal with the advent of Acquia has jumped on the commercial bandwagon.http://acquia.com/for-designers the link is to their page about designing as if it’s any more designer friendly (Microsoft and IBM is giving it backing). But what I think would be the way to go is to offer four or five key extras of features that EVERY designer is asked for at sometime in their career which could be sold at a reasonable fee, maybe ten bucks per deployment perhaps? I wouldn’t at all like to see Modx itself become commercial just because, as with Linux, it’s availability is precisely what empowers people with few resources to become savvy in various technologies and concepts.

these extras could be those which we single designers who have no backup from a coding partner or funds to pay a coding mercenary for, such as an Extra specifically designed for a real estate client. An extra that has a backend area to post a main photo, property details, other photos for a gallery, and then in the front end a stylable output with a searchable form that fetches price, local, agent from the DB. I live in a country where there is no MLS or IDX services and the client may be willing to shell out 700 dollars for a site, but once you get past 900, you are limiting yourself to only the elitist class, which in my opinion, just isn’t right. My client base is the small fry trying desperately to grow.

I am a huge fan of opensource and not just because it’s free, I love the principals behind it, I love Linux, the only thing stopping me from dumping my XP, is Adobe doesn’t provide tarballs, and if you are into any kind of photography you know Lightroom with photoshop is a must have. I don’t like the Mac (Mac users, don’t get upset) because, though vastly superior to windows being it’s similarity to BSD, I get a "keeping up with the Joneses vibe" from those toys and not to mention I don’t like the software being tied to the hardware, let me build my own kits thank you very much so I can get the same power while saving money to invest in new glass and software. Any of you hear that question from people: "Do use a Mac or Windows?" as if it is a test...If I had a choice it would be neither.

In summing up, I have spent a lot of time mastering photography, image manipulation, css, xhtml, maya (xsi, mudbox, cinema4d), vector illustration, and printing, I have a family myself, so when do I have the time to become a PHP guru? It will come, slowly piece by piece, but I CAN’T be a jack of all trades and, if I were to work in a large firm one day (god forbid), there would be a pipeline set up between individuals who master their own specialized field, even small firms (not all) usually have their designer, php/ajax, and copywriter/sales gurus concentrating on what they do best...so If you guys ever decide to put out extras which will be maintained across versions for a small fee to help people like me have the ability to meet a small business client’s needs without having to shell out even larger sums to outsource the work, I would be all over it!

Yes, I could just keep slugging it out with Drupal and get modules for free, but why if I am happy right here?

ok, tinfoil hat is back on and the Thorazine is wearing off, back to the padded cell for me.

Awesome post and I think you’re onto lots of good ideas here. More and more will become quite clear over the coming weeks. Moving this discussion to General MODx Discussions topic.

pheeeeew! I was a bit worried about that one, being a noob here and all so I guess if one of the big guys didn’t hit the ban button, I’m ok...

Only spammers get banned.

I know what you mean about sites breaking with a upgrade but believe me I have upgraded around 100 modx sites and never had a problem because of the way it has been developed ( built about 200 ), I also know that the upgrade to revolution is going to be a killer, especially for one of my main sites as I use allot of extras that probably wont work with it, however, saying that, the upgrade will be well worth it and it won’t be long before this great community will have answered all the questions.

Modx is like no other for simplifying things, I have to use interspire shopping cart at work and every upgrade means we have to re template the sites because for some unknown reason the crazy people over there think it’s better to include core code in snippets, so if they update the core code everything breaks.........

But hey, at least they only release version 5.5 4 months ago, then 5.5.1 to fix 5.5 bugs, then 5.5.2 to fix 5.5.1 bugs, but then a break 5.5.4 ( yahhhhhh ) just waiting for the 5.5.6 release later this month ( yes I can confirm its coming ) to fix the 5.5.4 search bugs.......

So all in all 5 upgrades in 4 months for about 60 shopping carts that take about 3 hours each to do !!!!!!!!

Give me modx every step of the way, been using it for a couple of years and the upgrade to Revolution is the only one that will break my sites ( and I’m betting that will only be my personal one ) ;o)

We’re very cognizant of getting upgrades and migrations right. It’s a very important consideration and there should be some very good tools to assist with this task.

Great to hear Ryan

I also know that when the release is made everything possible will be done to make everything work, that’s what makes modx stand out from the crowd and in my 7 (ish) years of development have never come across a more stable / user friendly system.

Looking forward to many more years of bothering you on the forums

I had a bunch of clients on Drupal and most of those clients were on a maintenance program so I was responsible for updates / upgrades. Every month I was patching this, updating that, fixing this module that broke when the core was updated for security. I looked at the total hours spent per Drupal site and the revenue. Then I compared that against Modx sites. Based on the savings alone in time, I could justify migrating the clients on Drupal to MODx and save money if looking at a 12 month maintenance contract. Guess what?

I moved them. Less time spent maintaining sites was spent on optimizing them and increasing traffic. The clients I migrated all noticed the improvements and decided to spend more on marketing. I in turn increased my billable and reduced expenses. Excellent.

Thanks to the MODx team and all contributors for giving me a clean / flexible CMS.

Absolutely agree, that’s why I don’t want to leave at all....I dread having to do another site in drupal, it gives me nightmares...literally!

This could become a sticky debate, but all I am saying is that if the core group of Modx devs decided to set up an extras library which offered complex solutions to those that we face everyday as designers without coding partners, and charged a modest fee to use them I would feel very comfortable paying because I would know that that money would keep modx moving forward, it puts food on my table and on theirs as well.

But I also think that the main library be kept as it is, I think that it is a great place to showcase the talents and dedication of the generous coders who understand the meaning of freedom of choice. We can only use them hoping that support will be continued, and I would say that a good majority of them work on any version the way modx is set up, I just don’t know enough about revo to know, I do know that as of right now PEweblogin which I have just deployed, may not be.

Of course once you open extras for sale, it could turn into a nightmare like that which you have with Joomla’s library (apps that sometimes won’t even work (the star rating doesn’t always reflect justly on the code)or are no longer supported etc) and then everyone will want to sell even the simplest script. I say if it’s paid for it goes to Modx, that doesn’t mean an individual like Goldsky couldn’t get together with the Modx team and develop some incredibly complex solution with the understanding that another coder could take over the project if he(she?) wasn’t able to continue.

basically I am talking about truly complex php here not a simple add to twitter link script. Instead of putting bounties out on scripts people who have the skillset could pay the rent and keep modx from being overshadowed by the likes of drupal (that sounded harsh, I am sorry, not trying to be)by really going to town on some badly needed code which the entire community could benefit from. It kills two birds with one stone, puts a ducket or two into modx’s and the coder’s pocket and gives the apps that we need now.

I truly believe Modx is the future as far as combining the three keys for a successful website using a CMS

• ease to design
  power of the core
  and the ease of the backend for the ultimate end user...the client.

but don’t make me go back to designing for drupal because a client with high hopes of starting their own real estate company, and who is willing to take the risk of shelling out a considerable amount of money, wants their own website. Apart from that, where I live, to put the client on drupal would be extremely unfair. Imagine someone who barely masters word trying to maintian drupal on their own...with modx I begin by showing them the document tree and twenty minutes later they are creating their own entries which are reflected in side bars or their main navigation....a smiling customer is a smiling reference.

This is a very interesting thread. I have been designing and developing for about 10 years now and have worked at all levels with all the major PHP CMSs available. Consistently I have come back to ModX as nearly all of the time it is possible to make a site the way you want it.

The only dilemma I often has is to do with the content tree in the admin. This sounds daft because actually I think it’s the best GUI for clients to handle, it just gets tricky when the client has thousands of resources or pages to add. I’m sure with Revo I can develop a Drupal-like (eurgh) system for listing content with filters rather than in a tree.

Already I am using Revo for my own company’s intranet, mainly for wiki/document lookup right now, but mainly to get used to it. Obviously there are a few bugs but it’s grown on me very quickly and to Ryan and the team a big well done. I work a lot using Zend Framework too, but especially due to the context ability of Revo, I can consider shifting some sites that don’t need the level of details of ZF. I’m really looking forward to developing my own add-ons when I get the time as the core code now looks like a very well thought out framework. Obviously I have contributed financially to ModX, but I’m also sure that if a professional support service was in place, then my clients would happily pay for it.

One of the greatest things I have found with ModX over the years is the fact it is VERY simple to train non-techies in using the admin interface. The crazy thing about ModX is that because of how nicely is renders code in the front-end, it is often impossible to spot a ModX creation, whereas with many of the other CMSs it stands out immediately from the polluted front-end code. I know many companies that work with it (I hope they all contribute) but never post on ModX forums for instance. It is used a lot in the professional web domain and yet not often written about. I will hopefully get to write a large blog entry soon on my experiences with ModX on my new site when I finish it (built in Revo and HTML5).

Just to add to the business model thoughts, I also work a lot with Magento and Varien, I believe, have produced a very workable and profitable model which could be looked at to expand ModX. The great thing is they have covered a lot of bases:

• Big companies want to pay for support, it’s very hard to persuade a large company to use Open Source software as it doesn’t say Microsoft! ModX is capable of large sites (I have built sites for blue-chip companies using Drupal and ModX feels much more stable). A professional support service is what they like with a SLA.
• Quality developers can add useful plug-ins through a proper sales channel and are therefore incentivised to develop (I notice the new extensions installer in Revo which perhaps has this in mind...?)
• The core is still Open Source and the community will stay strong

• ModX professionals/job-postings could also be a paid-for service whereas at present it is through the forum and may attract spammers.

• Certified partners. This I don’t like from the point of view of being a 1 man company as the costs are often prohibitive but I can see the financial benefit to an Open Source team.

Anyway just my thoughts, Jim