Rethinking MODx

Quote from: Geo88 at Dec 11, 2006, 01:01 PM

- You could also place adsense ads on the modxcms website , but that might degrade the user experience as some think ( though I would not agree , since contextual advertising is meant to be useful for the visitor - just depends on how intrusive they are ) .

OH GOD NO!!!!
please do not turn this glorious forum into a commercial maze.
I will pay for hosting myself to prevent this from happening.

-sD-
Dr. Scotty Delicious, Scientist.

Scotty, hate to burst your bubble, but Adsense or something similar is likely a reality when the redesign is done. As far as whether you’d like to sponsor the hosting, that’d be fine as well, though realize that it will need to be at least 4 cores and 4GB RAM, dedicated to the effort. Managed, that is.

As long as it is clear what are adwords and what aren’t, adsense is fine, and if we can have some mechanism for sponsors to not see them, it may encourage donations.

Some of Geo88’s other ideas are particularly interesting; main issue is that the best webhosts don’t necessarily have affiliate programs. But paid priority support would be interesting.

I am all for the monetization of an open source site with a nominal support fee to hide some or all of the ads. They do this over at the Small Business Ideas Forum and it works well. There are also other types of ads that work well. Many of my favourite sites have as much as 10X what is here on the MODx site. Some key positioning for adsense works well such as having adsense banners between the first and second post on a page.

In magazines and newspapers you can see 65% of the content as ads and people don’t complain that much if the content is worth it. Personally there are sites where there are great ads and I click on them because I am genuinely interested in what they have to offer.

OpenRealty, and SugarCRM fork vTigerCRM offers paid support and multiple levels, at that but I believe that much of their team are Indian as the company (from what I recall) is based in Chennai so their income requirements may be much less expensive.

Personally, I do not have problems seeing ad-senses as long as they are either:
- visually separated
or
- offer real value!

For the latter: I would like very much to see an ad where experienced MODx-developers offer THEIR skills for MY projects.
Maybe that’s just because I’m too old to earn my living (and that of my family!) by - coding...
But anyway: learning is great - getting results is greater!

Personally, I’ve found some good things off the adsense ads that have shown up here... that actually should lead to good things for MODx in ’07.

In 007 we’re gonna make it!

I’m chiming in a little "after the fact" but I think what I’ve to say is pretty relevant.

A few things that have been discussed on this thread have really wet my appetite for 1.0, things like the possibility of completely custom "TVs" and a contextual maps/categories. I’m excited and I work for a living so I can’t dive in and really get into the development process like I would like. I’m not an OO programmer, but I’ve learned a lot about PHP through the documentation on this site. I’ve developed the skills to script PHP and cheat using the MODx API to achieve some incredible results. Information is what you do with it, and as much as I’d like to have seen a little more regarding a few snippets I experimented with, I’ve become a better developer because of this CMS. Thank you Ryan, Raymond and everyone else who has made this vision a reality, MODx is a great tool and a great teacher.

One of the things I remember scanning over in this thread was doing away with the [*content*] tv. I like this line of thinking, if there was one thing that utterly drew me to MODx over the other OS,CMS’s out there it was this quickly accessible feature coupled with a "SIMPLE" Multi template architecture. The ability to consciously develop my end-user’s experience, and create pages and section with depth quickly.

I’ve looked into a number of CMS in my time, and I’ve found that none of them worth using at all are simple. DRUPAL doesn’t jump out of it’s install zip and make you a site. They all required work. I made the decision to use MODx because I saw the flexibility of the system immediately, and you won’t find a review on the web that doesn’t mention that fact. MODx is perfectly small enough to make a Blog, directory or homepage a fairly simple thing. I think the problem some people have with MODx is that they don’t want to get intimate with a CMS/CMF. I see MODx just like I see Zend, photoshop, or even firefox. it’s become an intimate part of my work flow. She’s an "APP"...

Quote from: Neutrogeno at Nov 02, 2006, 11:00 AM

Hi,
I checked the latest beta5-rev1785.zip

As for the hierarchy tree concept, I think with the section/subsection thing (plus the URL remapping) you could offer MORE flexibility to your users. In fact they don’t care about the hyerarchical tree at left in the admin panel (it can be misleading: see the current ambiguity about folder/container and files) they are looking for data organization and semantic URLs.

Also the TV thing is in my opinion very important. They are currently tied to templates but in fact they are a concept related to the data structure not its presentation.


(Note: I’m not a programmer but I know many CMSes and Web Framework as user.)

Actuallt .. the folder tree is one of my personal favourite parts of MOdx .. to say they dont care is wrong ... I do .. keep the tree!

2. The whole hyerarchy thing is simply old school. Instead you should introduce the concept of "section" and eventually "subsection"...

I disagree. Section/Subsection is old school. Joomla and Drupal still seem to rely on it. Yuck.

Still haven’t found anything else like the MODx document/foldering tree. Its fabulous! Clients love it! Simple, easy to learn and easy to use.