Modx vs ExpressionEngine

mydomain.com/path/to/page

This is only true if friendly paths is turned on. On some sites it is domain.com/page_alias so the path would be hidden. But in this case you could simply use the /page_alias and know what document it is about (since each alias in this case needs to be unique).

In my opinion the only thing that EE may have on modx is that it has a "prettier" manager (noticed I said pretty not more functional, their media manager rocks) and that may be challenged in Revolution soon anyway.

Good point Shane but Revolution will face another beast altogether with EE 2.0, the new admin is really strikingly better than the 1.x branch not to mention the codebase (2.0 rewritten with CodeIgniter). And they dropped some of the concepts like weblogs that "boxed" EE into a restricting pattern...

Though Revolution will be even more flexible and usable than Evolution, the competition is not resting either : it will be fierce, and one of the strong contender IMHO will be EE 2.0.

Well, I’m a big believer in healthy competition... cross-pollenation etc. Onward!

Agreed, competition leaves you no alternative but to improve, we’ll just have to make MODx better won’t we!

This is an interesting thread. Despite being an avid fan of MODx I am considering Expression engine for a couple of projects largely because of the "multi-purpose everything framework" that it offers. These particular projects, where I have to deliver a normal website, blog, forum and online shop, despite all being possible in MODx it’s probably easier to produce using Expression Engine where most of that functionality is covered by core modules. It would be great if MODx can start to move into this space.

Quote from: mwalsh at Feb 13, 2009, 03:04 PM

This is an interesting thread. Despite being an avid fan of MODx I am considering Expression engine for a couple of projects largely because of the "multi-purpose everything framework" that it offers. These particular projects, where I have to deliver a normal website, blog, forum and online shop, despite all being possible in MODx it’s probably easier to produce using Expression Engine where most of that functionality is covered by core modules. It would be great if MODx can start to move into this space.

Indeed an interesting thread. I have developed client sites with both MODx (0.9x) and recently EE, at present there is for me one clear difference between them, support.

EE has copious high-quality documentation and excellent on-line support. MODX, errm, has room for improvement. Consequently with EE there is a gentler learning curve and problems get resolved much more quickly. For commercial projects, IMHO, EE is the lesser risk and the license fee is immaterial.

Will this change with EE 2.0 and MODx Revolution? We’ll see.

Yes, for heavy commercial sites, EE might be a better alternative, simply because you can get someone on the phone if you need to, and there are a lot of built-ins and a big library of plugins and modules.

I still think you end up wasting a lot of time in EE... their template system is convoluted in my opinion (not nearly as easy to hand over template design to dedicated front end people), and the layout of the manager is excessively restrictive. Is it worth the time you save with well-crafted blog and shopping cart plugins? It’s possible...

Quote from: mwalsh at Feb 13, 2009, 03:04 PM

This is an interesting thread. Despite being an avid fan of MODx I am considering Expression engine for a couple of projects largely because of the "multi-purpose everything framework" that it offers.

About "multi-purpose everything framework", MagentoeCommerce dot com (mc) is a good example of EE I think. If you use the site often enough, you will find many "UI" flaws, using ’m’ deafult themes, you can tell that folks at Varien are not very good at UI but I think many problem in the mc site is more on how EE’s multi-purpose everything framework works- the limitation

I like the idea of "multi-purpose everything framework" however I am also a strong believer that one can’t excel in everything. I’d been playing with the Revolution Alpha 6 quite a bit lately, and really loving it, I hope Modx focus on what it does best, not multi-purpose everything.

If you like Alpha 6 download, you’ll love what’s in SVN trunk.

Quote from: chinesedream at May 07, 2009, 12:07 PM

I like the idea of "multi-purpose everything framework" however I am also a strong believer that one can’t excel in everything. I’d been playing with the Revolution Alpha 6 quite a bit lately, and really loving it, I hope Modx focus on what it does best, not multi-purpose everything.

Not a chance that we will change our focus; the entire philosophy behind Revolution is to provide both a basic developer framework and a content management framework for constructing sites out of components that can easily get access to common services. By not providing all of these common services in the core framework, or at least by providing ways to allow developers to provide custom implementations of these services without hacking core files, we leave the field wide open for custom, optimized solutions to be delivered on the platform, and for much easier integration with existing solutions (at least in some cases, depending on what is being integrated and how it was built). This may mean the initial cost of development and ownership is higher with MODx, but the life-cycle maintenance and change costs can be greatly reduced, as will the potential for vendor lock-in with the components themselves.