I’ve known about MODx for at least 6-7 months now. I discovered it shortly after I discovered and got excited about Etomite.
I’ve been using Etomite as a framework for all the websites that I’ve been building. I’ve been absolutely astonished by its ability to accomodate almost any small-medium development and customization scenario. I even use it on sites for clients who don’t want CMS, just so that I can have the benefits of it when the client needs changes or updates. I find that the difference in time between building a simple site from scratch and building it to work with this CMS is almost null. It astonishes me that more people don’t know about and use this solution.
When I discovered MODx, I wasn’t really that interested in it. My main reason was that it was a fork, and why go with it, when I’m working with the main branch, and I’m happy with it?
I did a bit more reading about MODx yesterday, and I went through the forums a bit. I was immediately impressed with some of the break-throughs that this team is tackling for developers, such as the module and plugin frameworks, the template variables, among others. I’m also impressed with some of your future ambitions.
But what I’ve been impressed with most of all is the extremely open and positive nature of this team. You guys encourage, consider, and discuss almost any idea that’s thrown at you. It’s made me realize that I’ve been ignoring something about the Etomite team all this time, and it hit me hard as I was reading through the MODx forums. The Etomite team can be really closed, tight-reigned, and...dare I say it...even downright rude sometimes. I think that I had justified this, in the back of my mind, as a necessary measure for keeping order in an open-source development environment. But now, having made a comparison, I realize there’s a much better way to do it.
One thing that hit me right away, after installing MODx, was the lack of the little checkbox agreement at the bottom of the admin sign-in. Nor did I see all of the extra restricting conditions tagged onto the GPL agreement summary during the installation process, requiring this and that, and requiring me to place some kind of banner or verbal credit on the public front-end of my sites. To be quite honest, I’ve been completely ignoring the demand for an advertisement on my clients public pages, and it’s a shame that the Etomite team is so demanding of it, because I would have liked to show them all of the great websites that I’ve built using their tremendous framework, but I’ve hesitated from doing so, from fear of harsh criticism and reprimand due to my lack of compliance. I believe that development teams deserve credit, but most of the time, when you’re building professional solutions for clients, they don’t want extra junk like that on their front-end. I don’t mind placing credits in comment areas of the XHTML code, nor do I hesitate from talking about good solutions to my friends. I also encourage my company to make occasional donations to the teams that have developed the open source solutions we use. I also leave and/or place all credits on the admin backend, so that our clients know who developed the framework they’re using. Additionally, I’m currently building my own site on Etomite (soon to be MODx, I think), and once it’s public, there will be conspicuous credits to the CMS I use. But that’s my choice, and since I’m my own client in that case, I know exactly what I’m comfortable with. So it has always struck me as odd why I needed to adhere to all the unusual extra requirements that were tagged onto the GPL for this CMS, the team of which expected their solution to be used for professional projects. It seemed just a bit overbearing. What’s more, I don’t think it’s even legitimate, under the GPL, to add things to the GPL, which contradict the GPL. You’re approach seems to confirm my notions, and it seems to be much more in accord with the original spirit of the GPL.
I don’t mean to be negative. So I’ll move on.
I’ve pretty much made up my mind that I’m going to build my next project on MODx. I’m very excited about all of the additional possibilities for building powerful flexibility into new solutions using some of the simple yet exponentially useful features that you have added to your framework. It really looks like you guys have taken the excellent work of Alex Butter, and made it truly and honorably your own, with innovations all your own, deserving credit all your own. I’m really looking forward to seeing the continual progression of this project.
Thanks.
Hope you find modx useful for all of your projects.
MODX Staff
