Competitive Intelligence for MODx and beyond

I think it’s time we start doing more research on competitive products. Public perception and developer philosophies are going to start being discussed more and more in our public forums and I would like to establish a good foundation of marketing ammo ready for everyone that is championing solutions with MODx (and Tattoo).

Some initial projects to consider as we get started on this. I think we all know the obvious competition on the CMS/Portal side (Mambo/Joomla, Textpattern, Typo3, Drupal, etc.), but we also need to start considering the PHP application framework side more. In particular, the following frameworks are all what I consider future competition to MODx and Tattoo:

* Symfony -- closest competitor to the Tattoo framework; uses same core for ORM, Propel, but is a more traditional MVC framework, requiring another layer of abstraction to achieve the level of simplicity our integrated CMS/PHP application framework can provide

* Cake -- another close competitor; by comparing and contrasting with Cake, we can establish ourselves well in the PHP-alternative-to-Rails market; again, our biggest advantage here currently is the simple alternative to a traditional MVC approach that Etomite brought into being, and we are maturing. Most MVC frameworks are complex by design as described by a developer of Cake:

"Although the MVC seems to make things more complicated, that is part of the objective. Since one of the advantages (and weaknesses) of PHP was its simplicity, the MVC adds complexity to bring more order and logic to the design process. The three entities are separated for just that reason, and trying to put them together can result in potential disasters, since it causes the whole pattern to fail."

I think it’s important to understand that MVC is an old concept, and implementations of it have historically been complex in this way for exactly the reasons implied by this quote. Without going into too much detail, I think what Alex came up with in Etomite, and Raymond made even better in MODx, is the power of an MVC without the complexity. This, probably inadvertant, simplification of the pattern may prove to be our biggest advantage over all the frameworks basing themselves on the traditional MVC pattern that was made popular with the Java servlet/JSP model years ago (and IMO, an inadequate model, after years of personal coding experience in this paradigm, and watching the current trends in development). If I can coin a phrase for us,

"Bringing order to the chaos without sacrificing the main advantage of PHP, simplicity."

Someone else mentioned Seagull. Their dependency on everything PEAR is unattractive to me personally, but a bigger advantage from my perspective is choice of ORM; Seagull uses ADODB, which is still being exploited in new ways every time I turn around. So far, Propel’s approach to ORM and DB abstraction, if used properly will guarantee that SQL injection attacks can never occur against Tattoo; and security in the typically exploitable PHP world, is golden.

And don’t forget Prado and Mojave. I’ll see if I can dig up more ammo to use up against these as well.

Let’s see what we can come up with together to convince the world MODx (and soon Tattoo) rule!

Now... I think our biggest competitor on the Tattoo front will be Rails... any ammo there?

And good info too, Jason!

Can’t believe that’s a "marketing" line for Cake... LOL!

I’m not sure we need to be competing with cake. Are you gonna try to give a kid MODx on his birthday instead of a.... oh, you mean that Cake. Nevermind

Seriously though I think this is a great idea. MODx represts a radically different philosophy from pretty much every other CMS out there and we need to be able to defend why it’s different. I have to admit I am way to ignorant of other CMSes. I’d love to have the chance to dig a bit deeper into some of the other CMSes out there. I believe whole-heartedly that MODx is a great solution, but can I really say that it’s better than Joomla? No, because I’ve hardly touched Joomla so I just don’t know. I can say that it’s better than Etomite, PostNuke and Drupal (at least in most situations).

One thing along these lines that I’ve been thinking about for a while would be to create a few side-by-side comparisons between us and competing CMSes. On the frontend I’d love to take a few of the default Templates from our competitors (as much as we can without any copyright infringements anyway) and create them in MODx just to show the power and flexibility of MODx.

Great input !

Yeah I mentionned Seagull which I came accross during my information gathering on the competition... I still have to install it and play a little, and sign up on their mailing list (they don’t seem to have a forum...).

I had heard of Cake but didn’t make the connection between this and MODx, probably because I am no coder... Didn’t know of symfony, I’ll check this out, as well as their forums...

I tend to agree with Ryan that Ruby On Rails will be a fierce competitor, and a trendy one at that...

I hate to say it, but the main problem with Cake is the Lead Developer... it’ll never get done (I’ve known Larry for years). He’s a killer guy, just likes to not deliver on things.

*ahem*

May I come in?

http://gaincms.com/screenshots

OH.. OK .. I am leaving.. keep the meeting going.

*zi runs away*

Jonathan has not started development of Gain.

I have bookmarked gaincms a while ago but indeed it does not seem to make progress. Don’t know about MooFlex either....

Bakc on the issue : I have been thinking about this a little bit more, and I have a few questions :

• CakePHP is a RAD framework. Symfony is dubbed a web framework. Are we competing on the same ground ?
• I like the clear and concise definition of Wikipedia : A content management framework is an application programming interface for creating a customized content management system.. But what’s the difference between a development framework and a content management framework (such as MODx) ?

Which brings me to the next question : We certainly do compete with php/MySQL CMF such as ezPublish and Midgard.

• Drupal, Xaraya and Xoops are listed too, but do they really qualifiy as CMF or CMS ?
• Where do we stand when compared to heavy duty Java CMF as Cocoon, Jakarta or Lenya ?
• Are there other alternatives that I am not aware of especially in the Ruby On Rails world : railsfrog, MuraveyWeb, alahup (QuickTime preview),...) which we are in competition with ?

Quote from: davidm at Jan 29, 2006, 05:29 AM

[*]CakePHP is a RAD framework. Symfony is dubbed a web framework. Are we competing on the same ground ?

Yes, they all have the same facilities that we will be targeting with our PHP application framework, as well as ORM and what is known as CRUD (Create Retrieve Update Delete), the basic functions of database application persistence. In particular, they have facilities to ease prototyping and other RAD activities by automating all of the ORM and CRUD facilities, so the developer does not have to deal with such implementation details.
In CakePHP and Ruby on Rails, there is something known as ActiveRecord that addresses ORM/CRUD; this is the equivalent of (though a somewhat different implementation of) Propel + Creole, with some of what Symfony has added on top of these.

For CRUD, MODx will have a way for users to define a data structure and automatically work with that entity via generated code. Tattoo may introduce a slightly different approach to this, with automatic class generation using the Propel-based ORM facilities, as well as cross-platform data migration facilities, though implementation details are still being worked out in this regards.

Quote from: davidm at Jan 29, 2006, 05:29 AM

[*]I like the clear and concise definition of Wikipedia : A content management framework is an application programming interface for creating a customized content management system.. But what’s the difference between a development framework and a content management framework (such as MODx) ?

An application development framework takes care of things like ORM and CRUD, as discussed above; A content management framework, well, focuses on managing content in whatever way you can dream up. I think MODx/Tattoo will definitely be competing in both of these framework spaces. MODx’s flexibility and plugin architecture already make it something similar to a content management framework, though some might argue without the true MVC pattern used by most content management frameworks (more on this below, in comparison to Cocoon, Jakarta, Lenya).

Quote from: davidm at Jan 29, 2006, 05:29 AM

Which brings me to the next question : We certainly do compete with php/MySQL CMF such as ezPublish and Midgard.

[*]Drupal, Xaraya and Xoops are listed too, but do they really qualifiy as CMF or CMS ?

In my opinion these are simply CMS systems or portals. No real competition once we have a little more implemented in the PHP application/content management framework areas.

Quote from: davidm at Jan 29, 2006, 05:29 AM

[*]Where do we stand when compared to heavy duty Java CMF as Cocoon, Jakarta or Lenya ?

We are Cocoon without the XML mess and the tired Java servlet model. In particular as we blur the lines between the various components in MODx/Tattoo, we will be precisely the same kind of component pipeline system, without the same kind of complexity Cocoon implements. Comes back around to the MVC model Cocoon sits on (servlets) as they attempt to create "a Lego(tm)-like approach in building web solutions, hooking together components into pipelines without any required programming".

Lenya is direct competition to what I am creating with Tattoo. After a quick review, we can talk to nearly every major feature on the Lenya features list at http://lenya.apache.org/ with the new data model/architecture we’re developing, and I would be willing to bet most of these advanced concepts will leak back into MODx in some form as we move forward. All of this will be a step towards what is called ECM, or Enterpise Content Management; a term popular with the big commercial CMS/Portal players to differentiate themselves from the growing number of open source CMS alternatives.

Jakarta is a set of related open-source projects that you can pick and choose from to build custom solutions. Great for big IT shops that have the resources to play with this stuff, but from my experience, it takes a team of developers to put it all together and make it usable. I have quite a bit of experience directly with many of these components, especially Slide which I integrated into a set of commercial portal devleopment tools for J2EE (back when I had a real job ); and it’s a technical nightmare for the most part. Since it’s all based on the core J2EE concepts of servlets, beans, and JSP, you are again locked into this model of what I consider unnecessary complexity (at least after experiencing MODx for a year).

Quote from: davidm at Jan 29, 2006, 05:29 AM

[*]Are there other alternatives that I am not aware of especially in the Ruby On Rails world : railsfrog, MuraveyWeb, alahup (QuickTime preview),...) which we are in competition with ?

Well, don’t have as much to offer here, other than we have the advantage of a huge base of PHP scripters. I don’t really know any Ruby developers (yet), and after looking at the language, I really have no desire to learn it. Though the pure OO nature of the language does appeal to my OO brain, the code is just too terse for my liking.

Railfrog looks immature, I can’t find much information on what MuraveyWeb is, other than a content management system "built on top of Ruby on Rails web-framework. It has support for version control, custom document types, WYSIWYG content editors, image transformations and much more.", and alahup looks like too many layers and is Smarty-based (this appears to be PHP5-based, not Rails), though might be competition for at least the Tattoo/PHP5 offerings at some point. All of these seem very young though and I’d be interested to see if anyone has experience with them at all...

That’s enough from me for now...