Community Concerns

With the word "MODX" people mean all different kinds of things. This makes the discussion a little difficult:

1. Many "users" who are complaining about "MODX" are actually complaining about the "manager". They don't have any problems with "MODX", they have a "manager" problem. This is the CMS part of "MODX".

2. The "developers" often talk about the MODX API, xPDO, the data structure of the DB etc. This is the CMF part of "MODX".

3. Then there is the "company" behind "MODX" which is a business run by people who have bills the pay. This is the LLC part of MODX.

When we talk about "MODX" we should not mix the 3 flavours (although 1+2 are somehow very close ;-) ) but make clear which part we are talking about.

Quote from: markh at May 09, 2014, 10:02 AM

I don't have an answer to any of those questions, but I think to move forward, there needs to be a "MODX Foundation" or "MODX Association" similar to what exists for Drupal (https://assoc.drupal.org/), jQuery (https://jquery.org/) and other successful open source projects.

A non-profit organisation dedicated purely to advancing and promoting the product (supported by the LLC, modmore and other major parties in the community), coupled with transparent and open decision making, will in my belief be better at leading an open source project than a (any) commercial entity that has to balance making money, and leading an open source project.

While firing JP is a very confusing thing to do from the community's perspective and there has not been a satisfactory reasoning brought out by those involved, part of me thinks that the personnel decisions, ideas and strategy of any business (including MODX Systems LLC and modmore) should not be cause to changing open source product strategy. The fact that the community has over the years relied on LLC maks sense given the history, but is not a long-term sustainable or trustworthy plan imo.

Bringing this right back, is this something that MODX Systems LLC can comment on directly? FWIW it seems right to me.

This seems like such an important thread that maybe it should be made into a sticky, so that it remains in view.

Just out: http://www.joyent.com/blog/node-js-advisory-board with more details at http://nodejs.org/about/advisory-board/

Bad example of how to communicate in terms of project leadership: https://github.com/modxcms/revolution/issues/12147#issuecomment-64025570

A response like this would have been better:
"We're working on a framework for handling accessibility issues in the Revo manager. For now I'm just keeping track of these issues in the separate repository, but we'll have more information about it soon. The issues can stay open for now.".

The LLC should ban the sentence "We've got this handled" if it's serious about managing MODX as an open source project.

Same difference. My Cuban ex-husband really used to get annoyed at my American shortcut slang too. He would have managed to make your version twice as long, and all as one run-on sentence at that.

I've been disconnected from MODX for some time because changes in my company.
I remember when I discovered Evo, it was really simple and powerful. The, we got revo. It was promising, but it bring us a lot of incomplete or not so well done features. So, a big project started to be really disappointing. More than two years ago I started to being tired of all these little things that turned a really promising project into a headaches factory.
Asked by the team ( as partner ), I decided to post my opinion in the forums two years ago, with no repercussion:
https://forums.modx.com/thread/82941/what-i-want-to-see-in-modx3-modx-the-small-things#dis-post-457736

Now, I've seen that one year later, the same discussion started in this thread and I was not the only once concerned about the project. It's nice to see that people cares about MODX, but, a year after, MODX is still in 2.3 with minor bugfixes.

I hope you can launch a MODX3 in a near future and keep MODX as the leader it has to be. But now, my eyes are in other projects like OctoberCMS that looks really promising.

The future of MODX?
https://medium.com/@drumshaman/keeping-modx-relevant-part-one-42dc6632f86b

As I wrote in Facebook:
"You speak a lot about the background of MODX. More changes that won't fix the day-by-day use of this great CMS. Maybe we will see something like 2.3, new face but same issues. If you use standards but MODX continue failing in small things, you won't be really improving MODX."

Quote from: markh at Nov 21, 2014, 02:39 PM

The LLC should ban the sentence "We've got this handled" if it's serious about managing MODX as an open source project.

If anyone is open to a discussion on accessibility vs usability or the WCAG Guidelines themselves I would be interested to see a thread for that.

It seems like $50,000 is being raised to make the theme a lot more usable, which is totally awesome; but that doesn't necessarily make it accessible. There's a difference. By definition, something can be usable and not be accessible but something cannot be accessible and not be usable.
https://www.google.com/search?q=accessibility+vs+usability

This project claims to be true accessibility:

The purpose of this project is to make MODX a first class citizen in the accessible software world

https://github.com/modxcms/a11y

That is a serious claim. My question is how is accessibility being defined for this project? The W3C defines accessibility by the WCAG Guidelines. Is compliance with WCAG Guidelines 1.0 and/or 2.0 on the roadmap?

My assumption is not. To completely do so would seem very unfeasible and is arguably impossible without breaking changes. The issues at hand on a11y.modx.com would make the Manager way, way better to use. None of them would make it inherently accessible.

So why is it being marketed this way? Have experts been consulted with to determine if making an accessible manager is even possible in 2.x, let alone for any given amount?

Hey JP,

Those are fair points to raise and I don't know if it's entirely clear from the writing on the a11y.modx.com page. This project is aimed at true accessibility with the caveat that we know it will not be perfect as there are serious limitations with Ext3. There have been reviews by Deque University's Paul Bohman and his colleagues with a full report of deficiencies for WCAG compliance and most importantly to be able to be used by people with different abilities and interaction devices. We also have a complete scope of requirements from The Ohio State University which precipitated this project in the first place. But we don't want to stop there.

The aim is to provide a way for all/any people who need and want to use MODX to manage content to be able to do so. Better usability for everyday users (who don't consider themselves on the ability spectrum) is something that should be a byproduct but, in fact, it's not the aim of this project.

We do need and want collaborators who can make this immediate project a success. We're in no way seeking to solve this problem in isolation.

For the next major version of MODX, it will be built to be accessible (fully accessible) from the start. Again, that can't be done nor should be done in an ivory tower.

I recommend staying tuned as we're looking at complete overhaul of the management and governance model for all MODX OS software in the coming weeks.