my vision of modx

Ok, i was reading a template included with indesign. It was about the history of PDF and products from Adobe.


I couldn’t help saying to myself that this is it !!!

I quote from around page 18 or so of that file.

The project became known under the code name ?K2??the world?s second-tallest mountain but the most technically difficult to climb. Throughout the process, Adobe?s engineering team was driven by one thought: to outdo the competition and set new standards. ?We knew we could do it one better than Quark,? says Al Gass, senior director of cross-media publishing products. ?Where we could go a generation ahead, we did, with transparency, XML [eXtensible Markup Language], and OpenType. We could change the underlying paradigm of what a page-layout application could do.?
Key to K2?s assault on Quark was its modularity. The program is actually a collection of software plug-ins, 170 or so, coordinated by a plug-in manager. This structure means that conceivably every component of the program can be replaced without the entire application being rewritten. If a particular client needed specific hyphenation and justification controls for its typography, that piece of the program could be swapped for one from a third-party developer or for an improved version from Adobe. Such an architecture gives Adobe engineers and third-party developers the freedom to develop features at a quicker pace than under the traditional software archetype, which means a speedier time to market for developers and faster update cycles for customers. Broken down into pieces, the entire application is much easier to maintain and update.

Just imagine that the core is just some code that ties together all of the parts. You need to drop in a new whats-ya-ma-callits and presto ! Everything is up and running. I really think that Adobe has something here that we really could capitalize on and actually bring in 3rd party developers BIG time!

You’re absolutely correct and this is a great vision to which to shoot for. I keep on harping in fact to pull more stuff out of the core and to put it into plugins... I’m sure it’s driving Raymond mad by now!

hehe, then he must be really glad that I’m here too

I wonder if Raymond has seen this post or not, yet? lolo, I bet he’d have an easier life if he doesn’t

lololol

We are going to keep remove various parts of the core. The idea behind MODx is that it should be Modular and Extensible thus we should try and live up to the name - The MODular and Expandable Content Management System (MODx CMS)

MODular eXpandable Content Management Simplifier !

If there is an installer in the mix then it would make Modx a truely MODuler and eXpandable by an average Joe not by developer.

Developer should be focus on developing and enhancing the addons and the user should be picking and choosing what they want to download or buy.

If that can happen then we have created ourself an third party addons amy like the way Mambo did and this army of Mambo developers make money from their opensource and commercial product for Mambo.

You know it’s funny--I had forgotten about this discussion but I was thinking today about this very point. I was looking at the newest Etomite release and noted a new API function, getAuthorData, that seemed kind of useful. It’s just a simple function that queries the user table, so I wondered if I should hack it in or ask Raymond if there’s a thought to put it in Modx. So then I thought about how great it might be to have a modular setup exactly as described above, where such a question need not be asked.

I’m curious though--any hints as to how it might be structured? Like maybe one more type of resource in the manager--e.g. add-on API functions?

TP4 is going to totally change how it works and make it dead-simple to do this. In the interim, I’m sure you could write a plugin that does this exactly. Raymond will be back online Sunday sometime, so hopefully he’ll chime in with the details.

Hi,

There’s no efficient way to dynamically extend the parser class at this point in time. TP4 will however address such issues.

You could however try the create_function method to create dynamic functions.