Alexa Observations

We’ve come alive in 2006. I’d say this will be the year for MODx, indeed! We’ve not really begun to really work cohesively on marketing MODx, bu Alexa offers a way to compare how we’re doing...

What is particularly interesting is when you compare MODx to other project, particularly the ones in the Opensource CMS Ratings. I’ll save you the gory details, but suffice it to say we’ve pretty much headed right towards overtaking Drupal and Mambo in reach. I predict we’ll do so this year, decisively. That says a lot, folks!

On the CMS front, I think we’re doing amazingly well, but in actuality, we’re really more of the PHP Application Framework. As such, I think our strongest two competitors are Cake PHP and Ruby on Rails (RoR).

RoR has the buzz factor right now,  but having spent the weekend looking at it at a conference, I can safely say I’d never be able to productively use it. You have to be a hardcore geek. Cake is basically striving to be a PHP clone.

The amzing thing: Alexa says we’ve surpasssed Cake for reach and we’re rapidly approaching RoR... again, wow!

My, my, isn’t this great news !

About RoR : I thought it was supposed to be easier to learn than PHP, or so goes the adverstising they do all around the web...

Watch the videos: http://www.rubyonrails.org/screencasts

While this is cool, it’s not really building a pretty app that you could give a customer, and lots of odd command line stuff: http://media.rubyonrails.org/video/rails_take2_with_sound.mov

Rails virtually requires you to have a development environment. PHP, a text editor and pretty much any web server in the world.

Ruby is a more "difficult" language than PHP, and isn’t as widely supported by hosting. I would say RoR is about halfway between MODx and Java. Although still prettier than Perl.

Yeah I have seen the 15 minutes video to create a weblog app video for instance is pretty amazing... I don’t know about making it ready for customer though... I sure can be done, Basecamp is proof of that.

As for hosting, it sure can be an issue but since I have lifetime hosting @TextDrive, I’ll sure try to at least toy with it at some point...

Right now, it’s still pretty young, I agree and maybe overly trendy stuff but as we say in french, "il n’y a pas de fumée sans feu" (if there is smoke, there is fire).

*Finally...*






[sorry for non-sense post]