New site development - Evo or Revo

Hello, I hope I am posting in the right place for this question, if not sorry in advance.

My question:
I am looking forward to developing a new website with modx for a customer. The website will be launched no earlier then april next year and therefore I was looking into early adopting Modx Revolution instead of the current Modx. It will be a site with loads of pages so I am afraid the conversion afterwards could cost me a lot of extra work. The points I’m unsure of:

- Is it safe to load the beta and develop on that, and will it port easily to RC-1 and the RTM release of revolution?
- Should I just start on Modx 1.0.x and convert later on?
- Should I if I choose revo take up the beta-4 or the SVN version?

The site will not go into production so any bugs will not really be a problem except for development.

Thank you in advance for answering my questions. I’m really looking forward to this ModX release I’ve been a fan eversince the 0.5 release was out

Quote from: DanielSan79 at Nov 09, 2009, 04:46 AM

I am looking forward to developing a new website with modx for a customer. The website will be launched no earlier then april next year and therefore I was looking into early adopting Modx Revolution instead of the current Modx. It will be a site with loads of pages so I am afraid the conversion afterwards could cost me a lot of extra work. The points I’m unsure of:

- Is it safe to load the beta and develop on that, and will it port easily to RC-1 and the RTM release of revolution?
- Should I just start on Modx 1.0.x and convert later on?
- Should I if I choose revo take up the beta-4 or the SVN version?

- Safe is relative, but if it makes you feel any better, we’ve had Revolution sites in production for quite a while now (almost a year).
- Starting with 1.0 is certainly possible, though it will be a conversion and not a simple one-step upgrade to move to 2.0.
- I would take up the SVN version at branches/2.0 honestly, so you can easily keep up with bug fixes and get the new PHP 5.1.1+ only features (beta 5 will be out shortly to reflect these changes).

Your biggest decision should be surrounding the idea if you can write most of your own PHP for the site, as there are relatively few add-ons available currently for Revo, at least compared with Evo.

I am using Revolution for my current personal website and sandbox: http://www.shawnwilkerson.com/. Other than a few strange occurrences, I find it smoother and actually easier to work with than evolution.

But I do believe you may need to have a little experience under your belt as it does come naked.

The package manager requires check marks to install packages. It actually took me a couple of errors to realize those were check boxes over there and not decoration!

If you have a little experience I would jump into Revolution.

I am also extensively working with jQuery and Revolution makes that easier -- even the recommendation to load the jQuery library and code AFTER the rest of the page is loaded.