PROCESSwire - The New EVO ?

Sadly some time back the MODx team decided to can Evo and now Revo - what comes next ?

There was talk about "MODX 3", but what's happening with it, will it be available some time this year ?

The problem I face (as do many others) is what plans do I need to make for the future, do I stay with Evo and hope that support will continue (thanks to: Dmi3y, Agel_Nash and Yama) or do I move on after approx. 7 thankful years with MODx.

After clearing all of the problems with Evo & PHP5.4 that I recently faced, I have since been contacted by worried clients and friends asking what's coming next, are the sites safe and many other questions related to their Evo driven websites.

I personaly think its a shame that Evo has been canned, for those who will now dig in deep and start discussing new is better, sorry, I don't agree.

( I just know this is going to have some serious negative feedback, but who cares )

This made me think and laugh - Its not exactly the point but the idea is pretty much the same.

There are abviously benefits with Revo otherwise it would never have been built, but from my point of view, for my needs and those of my clients, Evo was and still is a perfect match.

I don't need a system that can make me a coffee in the morning, I need something that is easy to use for people between 30 - 60+ who haven't got a clue about HTML, CSS or PHP.



So, now that the Evo life cycle is coming (has come) to its end what to do now:

I am fortunate to live in Germany (learnt the language many years ago) and am a follower of the German MODx community.

There are a lot of discussions going on both in the German forum and here of late about moving over to a new CMS/CMF called PROCESSwire.

Some interesting reading:

• MODX Forum Post Evo site: Provisioner or wait for MODX 3?
• MODX Forum Post If you *had* to choose another CMS for a project, what would it be?
• Marc Hinse on Why I chose ProcessWire over MODX
• Processwire Forum Post: Hi Everyone
• Processwire Forum Post: Questions concerning PW and it's capabilities

I personally have started to look into the system and have been happy with the results to date, although there is obviously a learning curve to overwhelm.

I have found that the learning curve I had with Revo was extreme in comparison (as I am not a PHP developer) which was one of many reasons I decided against using it.



I know this has been mentioned before and that the subject has previously been slogged out, but I think it should be re-opened and not be a discussion about "new is better because......"

I get the impression that there are still tons of people using Evo and that they would love to carry on using this product in the future.

I would like to call out on all those who are using Evo and ask what your plans are for the future, have you tested or are testing other systems.



Please note:
I appreciate everyone has their own impressions of Evo and Revo, but this is not a discussion for slogging out what is better and why its better, or why one verion should be used and the other not, please respect that when posting.

This is a discussion about what comes next after Evo and / or Revo [ed. note: iusemodx last edited this post 11 years, 2 months ago.]

Evo's core code was really bad. The parser originally was in the root index.php file, and getting it out into its own class file was a major undertaking. But it still has a lot of bad design. It needs a rewrite. Evo enthusiasts might be interested to know that there is beginning to be some action on the Evo github as far as pull requests, and of course there is always the Clipper CMS fork. I don't know how that is progressing, though.

The MODx team decided to go a different, more future-proof direction altogether, and Jason came up with the xPDO layer to base it on. While Revo pretty much accomplishes the same thing in the end, and surface management hasn't changed much, the core is more MVC-OOP, and the API for developers is much more advanced. There is also a much more flexible system configuration feature.

If I understand correctly, MODx 3 will be more Revo-like than Evo-like, but will be simplified in response to the feedback on Revo.

Personally in the short term I'm currently testing ClipperCMS with a view to updating my EVO sites; it's a bit of a no-brainer really. As a longer term solution I'm currently leaning towards Drupal after being impressed by some the tuturials on The Coding Pad. PROCESSwire looks promisng but don't want to make the mistake of going with a CMS which might get discontinued again.

Nice to see this question asked here. I answer because I owe gratitude to modx evo, for driving my sites for so long with so much success. And if evo would still continue to be updated and actively developed, maybe I would still stay or come back, let me explain.

For the last 7 years I have used evo on all my sites and it was absolutely great. I am not a designer, and not a programmer either, but I came to evo because it had such great capabilities in the seo field. I had people build templates for me around my wishes and as a result I had many many first place positions in the serps.

I had some wordpress themes ported to modx evo and played around with that. And all was really well. Until recently I ran into evo with php 5.4 trouble and that got me thinking. I then found the post you mention as well about marc hinse leaving modx evo for processwire (http://www.mademyday.de/why-i-chose-processwire-over-modx.html) and that got me into looking into that.

Then I decided to have 2 sites ported to revo from evo, just to give it a try, because I need my sites to be future proof.
I hired a modx revo expert to port one evo design based on infinitescroll and masonry to revo and that got underway. I then also decided to take one other evo based site and have it ported to processwire, just to see how that would go.

Turned out the infinitescroll + masonry site could not be ported to revo, because it needed some logic that apparently revo did not have...
It is now being ported to proceswire as well.

The other site that was ported from evo to processwire incredibly quickly (by a guy who was contemplating moving from evo to processwire, he was not fluent with processwire yet, but ported the site in no time). I tested the living daylights out of it especially for speed and I added the processwire procache module (which is a paid module that overdelivers on speed and I am happy to pay, because it supports processwire development) It turns out it is the fastest site to date of all my sites. It even beats the html exported version of my modx evo site. Don't know why, but it just does.

Why not go for revo?
I was nervous about all the talk about the slowness and bloatedness of the revo manager and then I started seeing more and more talk on the cloud which to me does not make sense. I have my own servers and also vps and when I look for a server or vps I go and find the best that is available and for me that is freebsd and directadmin based. I fully understand the need for modx to make money, but why not make that money by providing commercial modules that speed things up or make life easier in stead of trying to make money with hosting in the cloud. Hosting is a totally different business and I thought modx was about simplicity and speed etc in a cms/cmf.

The last thing that triggered me away was all the talk about ambassadors, why should modx need ambassadors? Why not focus all the effort on making the product the best ambassador it can be?

I came to modx becuase evo was it's very own best ambassador and now I am moving my sites to processwire because processwire itself is the ambassador I hoped the next version of evo would be.

Processwwire is simple - now that a couple of my sites have been ported, I go in and check the templates and see how it works and boy is it easy. With evo I could work some stuff out with wayfinder and ditto, but this is much simpler, it seems closer to php, less of an extra templating engine, which explains it's speed partly.

I can now do again what I want and all works blazing fast. It feels the lead developer also is totally and singularly focused on making it work and do what people want it do do, and the majority seems to fall for simplicity, ease of use, speed, scalability and probably a lot more reasons.

So modx evo, kudos to what you were, thanks to all the modx evo guys and gals who made it into something terrific. I would have loved to stay and will keep an eye out on things, but for now I am leaving for proceswire - with sadness, because I say goodbye to a trusted friend.

Modx Evo Thanks for the beautiful ride it was!

Quote from: olliemacky at Mar 18, 2013, 12:52 PM

Turned out the infinitescroll + masonry site could not be ported to revo, because it needed some logic that apparently revo did not have...
It is now being ported to proceswire as well.

What does that even mean? Sites can be built in Evo and Revo in exactly the same way. I think people still don't understand that the core capabilities of Revo include everything you could do in Evo + additional capabilities you did not have in Evo. Or is this about manager customization specifically? Or about specific Extras?

I know ProcessWire (PW from now on) quite well; I use it occasionally for smaller projects. And it certainly is a great CMS for lots of projects, but so is MODX (Revo for me). It really depends on the project at hand. For example: I would not want to us PW for a site having 5 sub sites. It is possible to do this in PW, but it is not the best tool for something like that IMHO. MODX Revo would suit me much better because it has contexts in core.

No single CMS works for everything, so please consider this before moving to PW because "they did too".

The other site that was ported from evo to processwire incredibly quickly (by a guy who was contemplating moving from evo to processwire, he was not fluent with processwire yet, but ported the site in no time). I tested the living daylights out of it especially for speed and I added the processwire procache module (which is a paid module that overdelivers on speed and I am happy to pay, because it supports processwire development) It turns out it is the fastest site to date of all my sites. It even beats the html exported version of my modx evo site. Don't know why, but it just does.

* raises hand *
I know this site, because I am that "guy" Sure, PW is blazing fast on this site's front-end. So is MODX Revo when installing one of the "static file" caching addons (that is what Pro Cache does in PW: it only allows a bit more granular control on what to cache). You can check my site for proof of that; right now it is even a bit faster than the PW site, although that may vary from time to time of course

Hi iusemodx,

I am in the similar situation as you. I like Evo and have used it for many client sites, its definitely my preferred cms to use.

I am still working out which way to go in the future and I have been pondering this same issue for quite some time.

Evo, ClipperCMS or maybe even Wordpress I guess. I will look into ProcessWire (I had never heard of it until reading some posts in the forum here) although learning a new templating language / cms is not appealing.

If Evo was no longer supported, I would most likely head towards ClipperCMS - it is after all built on the CMS that Evo users love with many improvements / enhancements.

Once I'd used Template Variables, its hard to consider other less flexible systems - and ones that I need to learn from scratch.

I have been very excited with the 1.0.10 Evo release.

I will definitely be keeping an eye on this and similar posts to see what other Evo users plan to do.

Checking Evo's main github repository, you can see that things are steadily moving along. I have also gotten some automatic emails from the bug tracker that some of the bugs and suggestions I've made are being addressed with a target of 1.0.11.

Evo development is awesome news Sottwell.

So make your bug reports and feature requests here http://tracker.modx.com/projects/evo. Especially nice if you can provide code snippets to fix the bug or implement the feature. And maybe even look over some of the open issues to see if you can help sort them out. We don't all have to be github gurus to make a contribution!

I'm pretty sure the same login for the Forums will log you in to the tracker.