Manager seems slow

Hi. I have just started exploring Modx Revo and I must say that the manager seems a little bit slow to me. Every time I click a document or resource in the sidebar, the whole UI including the header and the sidebar is redrawn and I can see in Firebug that ~8 asynchronous requests is made. Which altogether takes some time and a lot of flickering on the screen. Is that normal? Back in Modx Evo, when you clicked something, usually only the main frame was updated. It was very fast and Evo was pleasure to use. Frames are naturally obsolete nowadays but one would expect that they will be replaced by Ajax. Revo uses Ajax heavily but I can't get rid of the feeling that it should work much faster. I tried the Modx Cloud service and created pure installation of Revo 2.2.8 but the result was the same. The UI felt much slower than in Modx Evolution. Is it possible that I forgot to enable something?

Nope that is how Revo is due to the use of ExtJs although a bit slower than Evo, Revo has many features that Evo lacks.

Well, that's disappointing, but thanks for the answer. You're right that Revo has many more features. Still, I find it kind of funny that the UI uses heavy JavaScript layer yet it still works synchronously like any old HTML web page.

MODX Revolution is not as snappy as Evo, however what it lacks in speed (today) it makes up for in efficiency of getting things done. The sheer number of clicks to go from Content to a template to a chunk for a minor update in Evo is constantly traversing the main menu and sub nav vs in Revo you can right click on objects in the tree and perform quick updates in seconds without leaving the content resource you are working on. This used to be done by opening multiple tabs in the browser with Evo.

Revo 2.3 will be snappier but will not lose Sencha ExtJS3.x.

That all said, we never recommend running firebug while using the manager as it will dramatically slow the manager down as it reprocesses all the JS. I'd strongly recommend you try it for a while and see if you find the UX/UI improvements match the productivity of the more snappy Evo. If not, Evo may be right for you until 3.0.

Thanks for your answer. You're right that editing resources in small js dialog windows is pretty cool feature and it drastically reduces the number of necessary page redraws. So Revo will be more efficient after all

For Revo 2.2, also take a look at the AjaxManager extra.