ImmerseCMS Watch Thread

Following up on Alex’s post about his newborn CMS (Alex, as in original author of Eto), ImmerseCMS, and having quickly tested it I’ll be following up on it closely.

The main thing I’ll be very attentive to is MODx positionning, ImmerseCMS being so similar to MODx (at least for now ). Right now, Immerse is in alpha stage and many things don’t work. It seems it will have revisionning and multi-language capabilities, which could both be factors in switching over. Let me say I am not too concerned since more probably than not, when Immerse turns into a beta, MODx 0.9.7 will undoubtedly bring much more than Immerse to the table.

I intend to watch out threads, blog post mentionning ImmerseCMS and :

• make clear it’s following MODx footsteps (at least you guys should get credit for the whole Template Variable concept, which Alex calls PageField)
• answer (or report to whomever can answer, like Jason did on the thread mentionned earlier) any claimed MODx performance issue. Same for security. While I am here I caught a thread @Etomite trolling MODx security. I had posted an anwser, but it got all erased by Dean (what a nice guy, this one). I have not been rude nor agressive but merely stating a fact
• remind those who don’t know that the next release will introduce some huge improvements (I’ll just be teasing, not revealing anything). I won’t go into the 1.0 thing, since it could become a boomerang.

Let me know if you think it’s a mistake to go down this road.
I don’t want to over-react (there is nothing to really be worried about), but I want to make sure some facts are straight and if comparison is made, both side of the story are heard

Links

A post about ImmerseCMS (not named) @Etomite :
http://www.etomite.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=6369
I quote : "Looks like someone took the best of Etomite and the best of MODx and a few other apps out there and is creating a new CMS... except it looks like some of the same folks here are involved based on it’s forum... Are you guys stopping work on Etomite?"
As usual, Dean closed the thread before anyone could really discuss it

Alex’s Trail

On MODx forums : Alex apparently goes by the pseudo "ransom"

You can follow Alex’s post @Etomite by going to his profile page : Peanut
but there is also a profile by the name of immerse

At Sitepoint, he goes by the name "Immerse" :
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/member.php?u=114118

Ignore the stuff at Eto... I chatted at length with Dean and it’s all water under the bridge... I think they’re gone now. I don’t think Dean’s really all that hot about what Alex is doing really and was surprise Alex wanted the "MODx" ban lifted. I don’t think Dean’s all that bad after chatting for a while really. Alex on the other hand seems a bit off center based on his actions at Eto and his past actions. Dean did confirm Alex and Sniper HATED MODx with a deep passion as it seemed to be taking over at Eto... gee one would never guess that based on the relative community sizes.

I think Alex’s stuff is more about marketing BS than anything. He’ll be aping MODx 0.9.2 as we’re coming out with 1.0.

Yeah well I won’t go back to Eto for sure, posts get erased faster than you can type.

No matter what you tell me about Dean, there is no forgiving this kind of attitude. His reaction is just plain childish and stupid. Eto forums could be chinese for all I know, there is the same liberty of discussion as in a dictatorship. Anyway, never mind this.

About ImmerseCMS, well I agree with you.
But I’ll keep my eyes on it.

Please don’t go posting things that could incite ill feelings at Eto... really not productive. I told Dean to delete posts he felt were out of line, and he probalby went a bit too heavy on the delete button. Just let it blow over and don’t worry.

Ok I won’t as I said.

But my post was fact based, a bit humorous maybe but nothing that would warrant deletion.
Anyway, case closed...

I think it’s simple - if anyone brings up ImmerseCMS, ask them to compare the licences. They don’t even let you take off the Immerse branding. I’d be embarrassed to be using Immerse, so that’s something I’d actually want to do. For a magpie fork, even if it is by the original author, banning people from stealing their precious code seems a bit rich.

I don’t think it’s a big concern though - their forum’s high was 14 users!

Quote from: davidm at Nov 15, 2006, 04:04 AM




make clear it’s following MODx footsteps (at least you guys should get credit for the whole Template Variable concept, which Alex calls PageField)

If you go down the claim-credit path, you end up needing to credit Alex for some other basic concepts, when the goal is to be eto-free asap. The very similar path "MODx had this first.. indeed, that’s one of the reasons for the fork in the first place" is possibly better. Let others draw the credit conclusions.

Quote from: davidm at Nov 15, 2006, 04:04 AM




answer (or report to whomever can answer, like Jason did on the thread mentionned earlier) any claimed MODx performance issue. Same for security.

That’s true anywhere, not just pro-Immerse posts.

Quote from: davidm at Nov 15, 2006, 04:04 AM




remind those who don’t know that the next release will introduce some huge improvements (I’ll just be teasing, not revealing anything). I won’t go into the 1.0 thing, since it could become a boomerang.

Well this is handy for pre-empting potential claims of feature stealing, but the main difference is that MODx does more than Immerse *now*, and Immerse will always be playing catch-up.

Heck, the only things documented are Adding Pages and Adding Page Fields!!

I don’t understand the blog comparison - how do you add a blog to Immerse?? Where is the Ditto, the Jot?? No wonder it’s fast if it doesn’t do anything!

Jason, what did you do to get a comparable blog?

http://www.immersecms.org/cms-features.html sounds a LOT like MODx in the way it is presented but I don’t know how original the MODx stuff was. What is new is bollocks: "With the Immerse Content Management System, you can render your website in as many languages as you want, without creating and maintaining multiple copies of it - a potentially huge bandwidth cost saving." I can’t envisage much difference in bandwidth!

However, "You can, for example, designate areas or pages as subscriber-only content available only to certain groups." is a good point and we should use it if we don’t already. That’s the sort of thing that will attract people, even if they then find out that they have to put in their own subscription management system.

Oh and http://tracker.immersecms.org/ appears to be a 1-on-1 support place for one guy interested in installing it!

Ok point taken Paul, I think you have more perspective than I do on this one.
I revised my initial take on this...

But I’ll watch ImmerseCMS nonetheless, just more silently so to speak

When i changed to modx from etomite about a year ago, there was a lot of talk about a security issue in eto. There was some base 64 encoded code in eto in few places that sent emails to some address about eto usage and site details. At that time, eto devs (dean and ralph) found about it by suprice and there was talk that alex had originally put that in because there had been issues that eto was reselled on the web with labels changed etc. I don’t know if its true that alex had put that code in there, so DON’T quote me on this. I think that the threads can be still found in eto forums. But anyways, thats one reason that got me into looking better cms’es. If thats true, i wouldnt install anything that alex has coded without full code review. Later i found out that dean reads eto users private messages on the forum too.. Nice people.. But thats another story.

My mission is to really push development on my personal website (immerse.me.uk) and pip ’em to the Google number one spot for a search on ’immerse cms’. (bringing my site up to date would be a good start, lol)

Well you’re at #4 now (with MODx’s thread at #2 and the $100 logo contest at #3. I’ll see if I can slip an "immerse cms" link in on a site somewhere at some point.