Hello.
Thank you for your response, let's hope things will start to get better in MODX world
At that moment two events triggered my intention to start this topic, beside of problems with my MODX site. One was a thread about speed of Drupal and MODX on basic, almost empty side when MODX was several times slower. It required to make some manual optimisations and careful development of your own code to speed MODX up to decent levels (but not quite to catch up with Drupal). This tells how easy is to make something wrong - because of lack of clear docs and tutorial or maybe because of MODX nature, don't know, but it is too easy. This should be minimised to lowest possible levels. The second reason was upgrade of intranet site in my company, which was still based on 6 year old Joomla 1.0. Site is simple, without any extra plugins, but it was quite hard process. During that it came to my mind how much better MODX is designed and it should be much more popular than now. After upgrade to Joomla 2.5 and importing everything it striked my how fast it is now. I thought: they have some damn good caching. I wish my basic MODX site was that fast. I went to Joomla options and there I saw that caching was disabled.
MODX really deserves better.
I would like to adress some points I have mentioned in the first post, trying not to go into details, because they should follow changes below.
Community communication: I think people want to help, not only by helping each other but they could provide suggestions, report bugs and often provide solutions. There is need for 'MODX Site' subforum, where we could talk about details of what and how can be improved. What includes Forums, Extra repository, Docs, Tracker, maybe other things too.
MODX Development: I expect it may be harsh for some people and their good work, but I think there is big problem in Revo and it's called Evo. Situation where previous version of software is actively kept alive by part of community should be warning light for what is going now with MODX and directions for future development. Especially considering topic of this thread. I have no intention of criticise anybody, especially their hard work - both Evo community and MODX team - but you should consider asking Evo community why exactly they are keeping it alive and incorporate some (or maybe most) of they propositions into Revo. Currently Evo people are "wasting" their resources on things which does not help MODX now and it's future. Try to 'convince' them to move to Revo.
This could include especially manager side. Resource tree is quite slow now and ExtJS 4 is even slower :\. I would be very hard to ditch ExtJS but maybe it's possible to minimise impact of it's slowest parts (optional tabbed view, intelligent refreshing of nodes, manual refreshing). This is one small thing to make using MODX less painful
Using MODX and my references to WordPress and Joomla. WP and J make easy to jump start with your site. Tons of ready modules and templates so you can make a decent site using many available components and improve it later. This is easy way, when you can have something running and alive (not exactly ready for publishing but working). Further development of website is probably harder for WP and J and easier for MODX, after some learning, but you have to get there 'alive' and still motivated.
MODX is modular on lower level and consists of basic, bare core and Extras doing things which are standard in competition's basic packages. MODX base idea is different but it does not interfere with what could be easier. It's simple to develop and test in small steps. In this case there is no real problem with core, but Extras - they are a bit 'outside', even those supported by core team. Extras should remain out of standard core but development of them should be treated on the same responsibility level as core. This means: well tested, ready to use full packages with good documentation and tutorials. I am talking about Extras which do basic functions of modern websites and they come as standard in WP or J packages. This also includes a few templates. I know community and web provide some of these but quality is inconsistent and 'uncontrollable', often they are for advanced users only. We need few modern HTML5 templates which have good documentation and are easily modificable - this could heavily help to jump-start MODX based site.
When we will have ready such package with few extras there is last thing I would like to mention is
Good step by step tutoria: How MODX CMS philosophy works, how to build site from ground and how to modify it to get what you expect; building basic site, adding standard modules (templating, blog, navigation, forms, etc.). I realise that there are some good tutorials over the net and many items are covered in RTFM, but there should be one consistent tutorial branded by MODX Team and referencing base MODX package with base Extras. It could be improved by community and having it would be easier to reference when helping with problems.
Thank you for your attention, hope my engrish is understendable
Krzysiek
) but now the difference is growing, not closing. It's not problem with learning which MODx requires, problem is with quality of development, documentation, support including incommunity communication.
☆ A M B ☆
MODX Staff
