MODX Core development team abandoning MODX development as 1st priority? Please read!

Search Bechtel and Freemasons.

Oooh, conspiracy theories! I'm good at those! Since Bechtel is controlled by the Freemasons, and the web design company that built the Bechtel site uses Revo, and I switched from Evo to Revo, then I must be a Freemason! Even more compelling, I live in Israel, and everybody knows that the establishment of the State of Israel was a Freemason conspiracy! This is fun! Can we play some more? [ed. note: sottwell last edited this post 13 years, 5 months ago.]

<snicker>Sorry, but sometimes my warped sense of humor gets the better of me.

Quote from: sottwell at Apr 07, 2013, 01:40 AM

<snicker>Sorry, but sometimes my warped sense of humor gets the better of me.

Me too. lol


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Quote from: dinocorn at Apr 06, 2013, 06:08 PM

One thing that bums me out about the separation is I feel like there are some interesting things that could have happend that likely won't:

• Community Rewards
• Student Accounts

Wouldn't it be cool if say every so many forum threads you answer or participate in you get a Development cloud? I have 15 Clouds on my account, and I'm counting 7 of them are used for OpenSource extras I plan on releasing or already have in the MODX Extras repository.

Maybe SiphonLabs will still make moves with student accounts but it seems less likely to me. I think to grow the MODX community gaining interest of college students is imperative.

Hey JP,

I don't see the separation preventing this. You know Ryan and Jay well enough that if there's something that can be done to help the community, they will get behind it. However, just knowing how much they have on their plate, the question becomes the ability to execute on it.

On the first point, there's nothing that prevents us from writing something like a Community Rewards extra, and then kindly submitting it for their consideration. This extra would be highly reusable because in many online communities, one of the keys to getting people to contribute is a reward system. The MODX community is a bit different in that we usually can judge by number of postings. Beyond the constant contributions of the MODX Staff, we have the contributions of the "Parents of MODX": namely Bob and Susan. Then there are likely hundreds or thousands of people whose postings would earn them some kind of badge on their forum profile. Maybe something like this has already been done by someone in the community.

On the second point, I personally don't have involvement with students, but I definitely get the reasoning, and I think it is worthwhile to get students involved. If the software itself is in the price range that any student can afford (namely free), what is the additional benefit of providing them with a cloud account? In my mind, the benefit of the cloud is the speed and simplicity of setting up the cloud, which can be done using a lab account.

From a curriculum point of view, if I were trying to get students interested in MODX, I would do the following:
1) start them with a lab account, and within a few minutes they have an instance of MODX up and running
2) show them the basics of how MODX works from the cloud account with some pre-built content which is simply pasted in. The idea here isn't to necessarily show them best practices, it's just to whet their appetite and give them a bit win in terms of what they can do
3) Next, I'd show them the download and installation process. Get a bunch of them in a room and have them download and set up MODX on their laptop. Some will get it faster than others; the faster ones will help the slower ones. But since they've already seen the end product, they'll have more patience with installation than they would have had they not even seen what it can do
4) Once they've configured their local version, show them some things they couldn't do with the lab account version
5) Go through a few tutorials with them

My fear is that if the next generation only knows how to use clouds, then they won't have an appreciation for what the different components are (e.g. a web server versus the base PHP engine versus MODX), and what value they add.

Regards,
Tom

I want to put my two cents in on the suggestion for a templating system. While chunks and tv's take some time to be fully understood, making a template for Modx is very easy. What I liked about Etomite and Modx 10 years ago, and what I still like know about Modx, is that you can create a template with perfect valid markup. Try that with other CMS-systems, especially when you add plugins.

Quote from: dinocorn at Apr 06, 2013, 06:08 PM

One thing that bums me out about the separation is I feel like there are some interesting things that could have happend that likely won't:

• Community Rewards
• Student Accounts

Wouldn't it be cool if say every so many forum threads you answer or participate in you get a Development cloud? I have 15 Clouds on my account, and I'm counting 7 of them are used for OpenSource extras I plan on releasing or already have in the MODX Extras repository.

Maybe SiphonLabs will still make moves with student accounts but it seems less likely to me. I think to grow the MODX community gaining interest of college students is imperative.

After 14 pages I now also considered to throw in my two cents =)...I'm not planning to comment extensively on the whole SiphonLabs/MODX separation as I think the possible problems / concerns with it were already covered by many of the comments.

My basic opinion is: I'll stick with MODx whatever happens as it is the most amazing CMF (and community) I've ever seen and I'm confident in working with it after some time of experience starting with Evo 1.0.0 around 4 years ago and then making the switch to Revo as soon as it appeared. As many of the other commenters I just hope the the steps that were made don't mean a slow starving of the core development but I'm confident that it's not as it was pointed out by Shaun because there were just too many years of their lives invested (thank you so much for that!) in this project to let it disappear to the graveyard of great open source projects that never made it.

I also definitely see the need to generate a steady stream of income for the people who invest a major part of their time to make the (free) product which on the other end generates the income for many of us here, so that's what I like to focus on in this post.

This is also the reason I quoted JPs answer above as it seems to be a good starting point of what I have been thinking about in the last days. I see the highest priority in generating income for the core-core developers (meaning people working at MODX LLC) but also there should be rewards/benefits/passive income for all the community members that contribute to the core and have given invaluable extras/addons to the community for free, so how to achieve this?

For me personally the partner listings / professionals directory were always too expensive to hop on (maybe seems stingy or whatever, but that's just how it is) but I have donated smaller amounts to extra developers from time to time. So what I would like to discuss is if it would be a good idea to have a system (possibly built into the whole MODx login system for the forums / tracker etc.) that would allow monthly recurring donations of small (or big, you choose) amounts of money to specific developers listed in something as a (not public) "contributors list". Everybody with a MODx login could subscribe for that list and create a more or less detailed profile and describe what he/she did for MODx (extras, core contributions, documentation, ambassadors, forums activity, websites, blogs, github projects etc.) and provide the email address linked to their paypal account. When logged in, you could go and see that list/profiles and set up (also cancel) the monthly recurring donations to specific individuals inside that list that seem to be worth a donation in your opinion. The recommended amount for each donation would be 5$/month but can be anything you like (from 1$ to 1'000'000$/month).

This system could then be enhanced to also allow a public (and payed) listing on the modx.com site for maybe 10$/month or so (also a low amount!) in a less prominent spot than the professionals directory. It could be called the "supporters list" or so, with a possibly huge grid of names or (small) logos (think of 5 items per row or so) linked to the "contributors list"-profile. This would then hopefully generate a revenue stream for MODX LLC itself to cover at least a part of their expenses.

While reading this, for some the question maybe came up why I'm suggesting these obviously ridiculous small donations. I think it's much more likely that a lot of MODx users will subscribe to such a small expense targeting their preferred contributors (has also some personal factors playing in) and be eventually listed on modx.com (which I personally would be proud of) with a relatively small impact o their own financial situation than to subscribe to the professionals directory (which costs basically 1200$/year) and not knowing exactly to who their money is going and for what it's used for (cloud development? paying CEO(s) and marketing stuff salaries?...). Another reason for this is my conviction that "Many a little makes a mickle.". I'm actually not sure how many active MODx users there are (nobody seems to know) so I'm just taking the forum members count of currently 42'892, deduct it a reasonable amount of members which would let me with maybe 25'000 potential donators around the world. From these (let's be optimistic) maybe 40% are actually willingly to donate something, which leaves a pool of 10'000 people which would (hopefully) spend around 25$/month in average, this would create a revenue stream of 250'000$/month that would be distributed to the exact people the community wants to show it's support to (independent of any official salary payments or other work/projects a contributor is maybe involved in). From a regular established MODx-developers standpoint this could mean something like "get 500 people supporting you with 5$/month and you earn $2500/month from your work for the MODx ecosystem", for a core-core developer like Jason it could mean "1000 people think his work is invaluable for the platform and donate 10$/month, what would make him a living of 10'000$/month", which is enough to feed a family in my opinion...

A system like this could truly generate (passive) income and as a side benefit it would also be an incentive to contribute regularly (in any way, not only code, if that's rewarded, the community decides at the end) and create great extras, which "licence" could maybe also encourage a regular donation/"subscription" to the developer. A possible downside (but maybe also an extra-quality improvement incentive) is that if you just release a great extra and then don't develop it further or don't provide documentation/translation/features/bugfixes the community asks for, support/donation drops fast or does not even get set up, meaning you have to build a solid userbase for your contributions or extra (because it's used every day or incredibly helpful, think of MIGX, CacheMaster, getResources, Articles, Tickets, modRepository, AdvancedSearch, SimpleSearch, GoogleSitemap, Console, CheckboxSortable, ImageTV+, BreadCrumb, miniShop, Login, FormIt, Wayfinder, VersionX, phpThumbOf, CKEditor, AJAXManager, mxCalendar, mxFormbuilder, MyComponentMGIXUI [when finally available to the public =D] and and and)

I'm not sure if I'm completely naive and overconfident in people's will to give back something, but I personally would definitely be part of such a system (and for sure also make the effort to package some extras that are lying around on my harddisk for way too long and try to get a piece of that pie too...).

That was a long read and if you made it till here, thanks for staying with me =)! What I would be interested in now is YOUR opinion / enhancements / suggestions / criticisms / doubts for that idea! [ed. note: exside last edited this post 13 years, 5 months ago.]

Thanks for your post exside! I'm no stranger to long posts myself, and having a good position which you thoroughly defend helps to explain your position.

I agree with the partner listings because I'm not a web developer or designer, and I think that idea of small consistent donations would definitely help things along.

Regards,
Tom

@exside

great points!
one of the few sensible and probably the most meaningful post in this whole thread.

The donation procedure was a total PITA and only working for people with a very strong will to donate (It worked for me, but, man, it was a fight!). Why so many hurdles?
And, please, why is it allways "credit card only"? Outside the US not everybody has a ceedit card or is willing to use it on such a purpose. (I don't like to pay with cc because I want to pay now and not later. A direkt bank transfer is allways prefered by me.)
Why not quick an easy? There are payment systems like "PayPal" or "Click'n'buy" witch might keep a part of the cake but they are easy to use.
Be nice to the people who want to donate!

AFAIK, no US banks use the SWIFT system, which is used in the rest of the world to make direct bank transfers. PayPal, Stripe, or something similar, OTOH, should certainly be an option.