Quote from: BobRay at May 21, 2012, 12:21 AMPublic relations is definitely not my strong suit, which is part of why I've hesitated to jump into this topic. I sincerely hope that I haven't offended anyone with this post. I'm sure a more tactful person could have made these points in a much more diplomatic way. I want to emphasize that I don't speak for the MODX team here and that my assumptions may be way off base.
That's a long and detailed post that must have took some time and thought - I can't see anyone being offended even if they do not agree with the conclusions.
To take some of your points...
If the MODx team, which like every group of people on the planet has limited time, chooses to fill their time with Revo, Clouds, or whatever, then the claims that have been made about Evo continuing to be supported are a little hollow. Conversely if a group undertakes to support a project, its hardly fair on other's involved to all but ignore it and go off to do other projects instead.
I'm not saying anyone has any fundamental obligation to support Evo (or for that matter fix
Revo's bugs that you mention). I'm just saying that if you
say that's what you are doing, you should do what you say. Filling your time up with other projects instead just isn't on and is misleading the user base. Apologies from myself if that seems a little on the blunt side.
If the team had said from the start that they were writing a new CMS (Revo), and would afterwards only offer limited support for a limited time for the old CMS (Evo), then as long as the timescales were reasonable (there's a lot of Evo sites out there that may need security updates from time to time) then in my view no one could complain. That's not what has happened though.
On the other hand, whatever has been said 'officially', anyone with a modicum of intelligence has probably realised for a few years now that Evo was on the way out as far as the MODx team were concerned. Put another way, if we as developers built a site in Evo within the past year or two then common sense would imply that we have to be prepared to maintain the thing ourselves. The logical extension of this is that either Evo will die completely or another group will take it on. The latter appears to be the case.
Regarding package managers and cutting and pasting code I disagree all round. Certainly for small snippets, creating a new one, pasting in some PHP, and saving is hardly onerous. For larger one then also copying some files into assets/whatever is again hardly onerous. If it is onerous to anyone than I really don't see what is stopping anyone creating a package manager for Evo. In fact if this new project or new direction for Evo (depending on your view) continues as well as it is at the moment, well - I might even write one myself.
Contact forms in a few mouse clicks? I have a boilerplate chunk, a boilerplate snippet - with a few mouse clicks (in Evo's somewhat more responsive manager) I can have a contact form installed in a few mouse clicks also. Put the snippet call in a contact page template and job done.
You mention OO programming in connection with Revo. Just because something uses OOP doesn't make it superior. A usable procedural paradigm is better than an unusable OOP paradigm.
I don't find that xPDO works well for me. It may have 'features' but clearly you cannot do anything with it that SQL and PHP cannot do. If you prefer it and find it a helpful framework to use then it's certainly a reason for developing sites in Revo. I don't though.
I've used Revo because some of my regular clients have switched to it. I've never encouraged this, and see no advantage. The only case for Revo in my view was that Evo was effectively depracated (though this ignores the myriad non-MODx options). Perhaps no longer though and as such, I'm sticking with the 'new' Evo.
-- Tim.
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MODX Staff
