Evo to Revo or wait for MODX 3

I have been thinking about this for some time now and have discussed this matter with a few people I work with every now and again.

We all currently still favour Evo for its simplicity and end-user friendliness, but are aware of its age and that technology doesn't wait.

The one major problem we are all running into is when clients ask for updates - I have told my clients the situation and they are all OK with this, but also wonder what the future will bring.

The community developers who took over the development of Evo are doing and have been doing a great job, in my opinion they have kept Evo from falling away.

I have tried to help where I can with testing and reporting possible errors / bugs, which have all in turn since been fixed

To get to the point:

I am well aware of the fact that Evo is nowadays in the minority, I don't have hardcore facts but I would still lean out of the window and say multiple thousands are still using it on old and new sites.

We are all in the same boat when it comes to the future of our Evo sites, including those who use both Evo and Revo.

The future sees the deprecation of the "mysql" extension in PHP 5.5+, meaning Evo won't work or won't work correctly (please forgive me if this statement is not 100% correct, I am a front-end designer/developer, not back-end, PHP and database is not a language I speak )

Jako mentioned in one of his replies on a different post in the forum that "All db access have to be changed to mysqli" for Evo to work with PHP 5.5+

So far as I am aware, this is quite a challenge and won't happen overnight if at all.

Which brings me to the point where I ask:

Is there still a future with Evo ?

Are there modifications currently being made to future-proof Evo or will it be passed over in the near future ?

Is it worth moving from Evo to Revo or would it be better to wait until MODX 3 is released ?

I'm quite sure that Evo will be brought up to speed before that becomes an issue. I only switched to Revo because of my long-term association with the core MODx community - well, and curiosity. But then I'm not a designer, and really just a "shade-tree mechanic" developer, so I view things a bit differently.

My opinion (which probably isn't worth much) is that moving from Evo to Revo would get you well over half-way to MODX 3. I also think that there may be a migration tool for Revo -> MODX 3 *long* before there is one for Evo -> MODX3. I could well be wrong.

I don't know what the best answer for your situation is as it depends on your clients as well, but if nothing else I would encourage you to take the time to learn Revo and get used to the way xPDO treats everything as an object. That's one thing I'm pretty sure about that will only be taken further with MODX3, while I guess things like the manager interface and what not are pretty much up for grabs.

Then again, that's more of a developer thing, so not sure how well that translates to your needs.

There's some cool features you should at least know about in Revo (like contexts and packages/package management) I would not change platforms (as that's what Evo>Revo or Evo>MODX3 is) just for those, unless there's a big need for one of those features in your site(s).

In the end it depends on you and your clients. If they expect to be on the latest because you have a support agreement, then I'd say there's plenty of time before MODX3 is out to use Revo now. If they're happy with the site as is, and php 5.5 isn't being forced on you by your host any time soon, then you could just keep them on evo.

Would just like to say thanks for the feedback

I see from a developer point of view that Revo is currently the better solution, but for a non-programmer like myself (who is still battering his head against the wall for not paying attention in school many many years ago as programming was introduced as part of the curriculum) it's a steep learning curve.

Another concern of mine is the re-investment.

I have invested a large 5 figure sum in programmers over the last 6/7 years for snippet + modules built for Evo, so before I re-invest this money there is the matter of knowing what's happening with MODX 3.

Revo will be made redundant when it arrives, so investing into Revo and again for MODX 3 isn't realistic.

@ BobRay

All opinions are welcome and are worth something if they are constructive, as is yours.

If Evo is working well for you, there's no reason for you to switch. Custom Manager Pages (CMPs) isn't as nice as ManagerManager, and there still isn't anything quite as nice as YAMS. It does have a different cache system, so it handles large sites better than stock Evo (I believe the Japanese community came up with a different caching system for Evo, but I don't think that ever got into the "official" release).

Probably the biggest advantage of Revo for a non-developer is the concept of "Contexts", whereby you can use the same core and Manager for multiple sites. They're also used, along with a plugin called Babel, for multiple languages, but it's kind of awkward, and uses a separate resource for each language.

User management is totally different. My mommy always said that if you can't say something nice it's better to not say anything at all, so I won't say any more about that.