"commercial" resources

i’m new to Modx so excuse this question if it is old discussion, but why aren’t more (or any) of the Modx resources commercial or pay based? While Joomla is open source, many talented developers have gone beyond the "community call of duty" and developed useful components with a nominal price tag. I have no problem paying for resources if it is going to advance my business. It’s like getting a free mercedes in exchange for some community cleanup (at my choice) and having to pay for the cute dice hanging on my rear view mirror. i think that is partially why their is such a robust devlelopment effort surrounding some of the better Joomla modules and components (that carrot thing in addition to the longevity thing as well). I’m not knocking the Modx development efforts - I am impressed, appreciative and in awe at this community, I’m just raising the question...

Quote from: RSG at Apr 05, 2007, 10:48 AM

i think that is partially why their is such a robust devlelopment effort surrounding some of the better Joomla modules and components (that carrot thing in addition to the longevity thing as well).

Rest assured we are making preparations to attract a greater quantity and quality of developer to the project. But we are also carefully crafting a vision and business model to support the longevity of the MODx project in general; the issues of commercial add-ons and extensions is certainly one of the things we’re addressing. As we approach 1.0 release, you will start to see some of the fruits of our efforts to date, including the new object-oriented core engine, more consistent APIs, and in-depth code documentation, all of which should help make component development for the MODx platform more attractive to developers. But, first things first. We’re exploring some new approaches to CMS in many ways here, and I hesitate to push efforts too far, too soon, especially when supporting a potentially large, active developer community. It’s a balancing act of progress and stability, and one I want to keep on track while trying not to hamper the efforts of those who have already chosen to adopt MODx.

It also seems to me that a lot of personal and unique addons are being made that are not ready for mass consumption. Since everything is so extend able and modular, you can really create a very optimized script do what you need, instead of relying on an overall script that has many useless parameters.

I see MODx, in it’s current state, with a very strong community of developers who can crank out great, specific and personalized apps. And the generic apps are coming quite a long as well (eForm, Ditto, Wayfarer, and calendars =).

Chuck

I can appreciate the "crawl, walk, run" approach that both Jason and Chuck have emphasized. My point and initial question was more to find out what the "founders" thinking was on paying developers to create and support the resources we use to run our business. While I see (and once again am awed by) the large number of resources available now <1.0 , I think that motivating developers through $$ makes good incentive to further develop competing resources by creating a marketplace . And also supporting those resources. RG

Developers are free all they want to charge dollars for features. I think what you’ll find now though is that there’s a lot more value to be gained from offering a robust, reliable base from which to work, and a larger community around the project. I can assure you there will likely be commercial offerings in the future, but our standards are pretty high, and there’s a lot of core work to do for now as Jason stated.

I am awaiting 1.0 with much anticipation. I have a couple of projects in mind but not being a coder has made me wait for 1.0. I don’t see much point in hiring coders to do work that will apparently be obsolesced in the next .04 revisions. It is possible that developers are waiting for stability before releasing commercial product. Much less stress to release ’free’ product as such for the time being. Once 1.0 is realized, I believe we will see more ’serious’ developers.

Looking at current add-ons (Wayfinder, Jot, et al) makes me giddy thinking about what will be possible when developers have a more stable base to code for.

Commercial developers don’t normally code for ’beta’ software. Although 0.9.5 is an excellent product, it isn’t 1.0. Patience will reward us and them, I think.

MODx in it’s current state is hardly "beta". Future versions will be compatible with most things that currently use the public API methods. We could have easily called 096 and even 095 a "1.0" ... and in fact, our 1.0 release will greatly surpass most other comprable solutions 2.0 or even higher releases.

And, might I add, saintchuck, we already have very serious (and talented !) developper @MODx ! No doubt there will be even more of them in the future, I agree with you

I don’t think waiting for 1.0 is the good strategy : things move fast, especially in MODx-Time And given the learning curve, it’s best to capitalize than wait : what you learn might become partly obsolete, but the logic behind MODx will remain... you’ll be able to learn the new stuff faster IMHO.

Rev numbering has always been a subject for debate in OS communities, I know this from my days @Textpattern’s, we long had a very stable gamma version (feel the joke in the naming - there never was an alpha or beta) and 1.0 was never released precisely because of this kind of debate Dean Allen decided to name the first "stable" release 4.0 (because he turned 40 at the time of the release lol). This confused some people, but those who knew the app knew it did not matter...

This being said, I understand having a common language can help, and "1.0" is normally a "stamp" of stability. In MODx case, it’s not : 0.9.0 and 0.9.1 already were ready for production if you knew what you were doing, and I’d say 0.9.2 was the first really stable release we had. The next rev (0.9.6) will be a very fine tuned and honed product, which compares quite well to any major OS CMS around there in terms of stability (don’t even get me started on the unparalleled flexbility we offer compared to existing apps)

Anyway, should you wait for a new starting point (which you should not ), you could wait for 0.9.7 which will be the introduction of the new codebase with xPDO and the beginning of the road to 1.0 (so to speak). The gap between 0.9.6 and 0.9.7 will be more than a 0.1 rev jump : you shouldn’t base decision on rev numbers but rather on what’s in store.

I mean, we have a conservative rev numbering in a way, which proves how high we aim

You can pay for any of my resources if that makes you happy