Community Concerns

Hello Everyone!

In case you don't know, my name is YJ. For more than 2 years now, I've had the honour and pleasure of working for MODX, LLC, alongside talented people whom I respect and love to interact with. It's really a dream job, and I hope someday many more people will have the opportunity to experience it, as part of a thriving organization that leads and fosters the growth of the MODX platform.

Before that, however, I was a self-employed, freelance, web professional, doing exactly what most of you in this forum are doing: making a living on the web, and using MODX as part of my toolset. As such, please know that your concerns, frustrations and suggestions are totally heard. (Maybe not responded to as quickly as one would like, but definitely heard.)

A lot has changed in 2 years, and other things have remained the same. Some things that should have changed have not, and some things that should have remained the same are different. This is Business, and one might venture to say it is Life. On the other hand, a LOT of great things have happened — are happening — and we might also celebrate those as a part of Life, and a sign that actually the Future of MODX is bright as it ever was.

Many of these changing (or not changing) things are related to the comments and concerns expressed here. In light of the understandable concerns from the community-at-large about being kept in the dark, I'm going to share some true and accurate “inside” info about such things, in hopes of clearing up some of the uncertainty around the present state of our most beloved MODX CMS.

Management and Direction

Two years ago, the management team was entirely different. Some have voiced concerns about not knowing the “direction” that MODX is moving towards nowadays. Well, back then, the direction was clear: Launch MODX Cloud.

To make a very long story short, “The Launch” happened, but with a huge cost. The management team, and the organization as a whole, were divided. One side wanted to push the Cloud platform ahead by any means possible, and the other side wanted to focus on growing and leading the MODX open source CMS project — something that had taken a back-seat during Cloud development. Thus the “SiphonLabs Divide” occurred.

From that point on, over a year ago, Shaun McCormick aka “splittingred” would cease to contribute to the MODX open source software. In reality, he had been focussing almost exclusively on the Cloud platform for quite some time already, but needless to say, the rapid pace of development enjoyed by Revo's early releases would not be reproduced in Shaun's absence.

Additionally, the aforementioned “Divide” resulted in some orphaned internal projects. As just one example, the brains behind the user management functions of the Extras Repo and Professionals Listings had ceased to contribute to those projects. In the wake of that, Jason Coward has, heroically, shouldered much of the burden of fixing, maintaining and upgrading MODX infrastructure, on top of his duties to the OSS.

So to sum up this section: the “direction” of MODX, LLC is, and has been since early 2013, to lead and grow the MODX CMS software. What may be perceived as the “slow"pace of development is a natural part of the recovery process from a singular event that reduced development resources and resulted in "technical debt” that Jason's been making deposits against, bit by bit.

So, is this a good thing? Or a bad thing?

Reading the above, one might sense some negativity, with phrases like “divide” and “technical debt,” however lots of good has come out of all this.

Sure, there's no concrete roadmap for specific features in upcoming releases, but it's certain the next release will be a MODX open source CMS! There's admittedly room for improvement, especially in the areas of community involvement and communication around the OS project's development, but honestly folks — we're getting there.

Challenges notwithstanding, the team at MODX, LLC has actually been growing. Most of you will already know that John Peca has been heavily involved with Revo, integrating PRs and flexing his own considerable dev muscles in the codebase. The “core team” is now a 2-person team again, and having worked directly with John on many projects, I can say he is an incredibly talented developer — amazingly capable and at the same time fiercely dedicated to the MODX CMS project. The #win of having John onboard cannot be overstated.

Let's not forget too the solid contributions of JP DeVries while he was part of the core team, the buzzing hive of activity that is modmore, and other businesses like it (MODX Themes, for example). The increase in such contributions of late is a good sign. Remember, a year ago, there were no such things, and if you look at the issue resolution in Revo's git repo, you'll see a lot of reasons to feel good about how things are developing.

A year is a long time in software development. What else has been going on?

MODX Cloud merged back in with the open source team around this time last year. Mike Schell and Jeff Propes have been hard at work refining and stabilizing the platform, such that today it is categorically different from the MODX Cloud of yesteryear.

Not to mention the fact that one of the pivotal technologies behind MODX Cloud has since been open-sourced. The Teleport tool allows you to Snapshot an entire MODX site with a few simple CLI commands. You can migrate, deploy, and duplicate MODX sites with ease. You can download Teleport for free and use it on any site/server you wish, just like the MODX CMS itself. A year ago this wasn't even remotely on the radar.

A lot of advancements have been made quietly — perhaps too quietly. Feature developments are most often driven by clients of the MODX Pro Services team. MODX is still bootstrapped by funding from such clients, and much gratitude is owed to them. A quick rundown of the MODX Circle of Life:

1. Folks like you, in this forum, use MODX for free, and love it, and therefore express to the world how great it is, and your beautiful work is showcased on the open Internet.
2. Businesses see this, and consider MODX as a platform of choice for their own needs.
3. Those companies hire agencies or design shops that use MODX, and they bootstrap amazing Extras and core features that improve the CMS. Sometimes, companies have requirements that can be most efficiently handled by the MODX core team, in which case we build stuff for them that extends or improves the CMS.
4. Either way, those features and development work get integrated with the core, or into the Extras repo. This benefits the user-base, and helps to increase adoption, which brings us back to Step 1.

Admittedly, Step 4 has been happening less rapidly than I myself would like (thus my comment about it being “too quiet”). We actually have a queue of really cool Extras that have been developed for clients, and are almost ready for release, but we just haven't been able to wrap them up for prime-time.

We're working to improve on this, but a couple have been released like Collections, and Tagger for example. If you haven't tried them out, head over to the Repo. Combined, they can be a lean, mean replacement for Articles as a blogging setup.

We've also spent a lot of client-driven hours developing a system, and a knowledge base, around highly scaled environments for MODX. This is extremely valuable know-how and feeds into the "Life Cycle" above. It also means we can help you help your clients with such needs.

Wrap it up, dude, this post is too long.

Well, to sum up: yeah there's lots that can be improved. There's challenges still, and mistakes yet to be made. The good thing is: MODX is still here, and it's getting better bit by bit. The better news is: YOU are still here. You are taking your time to post your concerns, to provide ideas, to throw your two cents in, which means you care about MODX CMS.

MODX (the software) is like a puppy. It will love you unconditionally. Just play with it (use it as part of your toolkit) and feed it (continue to participate and contribute), and we all — community members, ambassadors, pros, staff, management, clients — we all can have a part in "holding its leash".

By the way, if anyone wants to get together for an informal pow-wow about all this, and anything MODX related, I'm hosting a short hangout here: https://plus.google.com/events/c39giuo6c2op2lgbrthqh774mmo and plan to do so on a regular basis. Hope to see you there! [ed. note: sepiariver last edited this post 12 years, 3 months ago.]

Shaun, I'm glad you posted. There is some great insight in there and some actionable items one could take away in terms of laying out a roadmap with breaking changes.

Quote from: sepiariver at Jun 02, 2014, 07:08 PM

Hello Everyone!
Folks like you, in this forum, use MODX for free, and love it, and therefore express to the world how great it is, and your beautiful work is showcased on the open Internet.

People may remember, both as an employee and as a contributor I've been as quick as any to remind folks that MODX is an opensource project and they can hurry up and wait or find a way to help out. More so than ever, I now realize that nobody uses MODX for free.

It might not cost you anything to download the codebase and build a business around it, except valuable time of your career that you could be spending with any other technology. When people use MODX and participate in the community they may be investing the most valuable thing they may have, their career, in the product and the ecosystem that supports it. It is not unreasonable for them to expect some direction and for that information to be free of the "spin factor".

I support the concept of a .org with the hopes it would provide a level of communication with members of the community that contains more accurate information and less marketing fluff.

I never agreed with treating the community like shareholders, who need to be continuously assured. I think the "everything is fine, hold tight for a big announcement" marketing spin spilling over into public relations around the open source product as it has in the past helps no one. It also probably caused confusion when I spoke at a Denver MODX meetup in April and had a completely different message.

I remember the "2.3 beta" being announced as available now (you know kind of Apple style) at MODXpo Cologne. This was news to me, and as far as I remember knowing it was to every other team member at the time as well.

That was 7 months ago in a room full of people who flew all over the world for accurate, exclusive information they could take to the bank. Was 2.3 officially tagged for beta then? Is it now?

Quote from: sepiariver at Jun 02, 2014, 07:08 PM

Let's not forget too the solid contributions of JP DeVries while he was part of the core team.

I would be fine if you did forget them if it would help us focus more on the horizon, where we should always be looking. (btw protip: sign your git commits with a personal email address). I agree with Shaun in that some improvements and exciting design updates have been made in the develop branch, but nothing worthy of a major version update or the industry-shaping features MODX has introduced in the past.

Quote from: dinocorn at Jun 02, 2014, 08:09 PM

...nobody uses MODX for free.

It might not cost you anything to download the codebase and build a business around it, except valuable time of your career that you could be spending with any other technology. When people use MODX and participate in the community they may be investing the most valuable thing they may have, their career, in the product and the ecosystem that supports it. It is not unreasonable for them to expect some direction and for that information to be free of the "spin factor".

Totally get where you're coming from, and the logic that an investment of time into a given platform is valuable. In fact it is priceless.

By the same logic I'd venture to say that the same investment in any platform: MODX, WP, Drupal, Joomla, Craft, Ghost, Next-Hot-CMS, has similar value and requires similar effort. So I guess the question really is: "All things equal, does a career choice to use MODX provide more or less value than another platform?"

Everyone will have to make that choice on their own. I for one: if I woke up tomorrow and found myself a freelance, self-employed web professional again, I would, without even the tiniest moment of hesitation, choose to invest my time and effort in MODX CMS.

I know from our discussions JP that you don't feel the same way. That's fine. But others still do. Not just me, other developers, companies, designers - there's lots of people out there who still love to use MODX...and they (we) deserve a voice and space in these forums as well

As for information free of "spin factor", I hope you don't mean my post. I spent a good deal of time trying to only express things in that post that I could verify objectively as true. If it can be shown that some part of my post is categorically false, I'd be happy to publish a correction. However from where I stand the post is accurate.

If you mean a general opinion in the community that MODX, LLC's communications have a "spin factor" feel, I'm certainly open to discuss that at the published Google Hangout, or in any other channel. I think there's some work to do, to re-forge a true and lasting relationship between Community and MODX, LLC, and I'm more than happy to invest my own time and efforts to that end

Quote from: sepiariver at Jun 02, 2014, 10:06 PM

Quote from: dinocorn at Jun 02, 2014, 08:09 PM

...nobody uses MODX for free.

It might not cost you anything to download the codebase and build a business around it, except valuable time of your career that you could be spending with any other technology. When people use MODX and participate in the community they may be investing the most valuable thing they may have, their career, in the product and the ecosystem that supports it. It is not unreasonable for them to expect some direction and for that information to be free of the "spin factor".

By the same logic I'd venture to say that the same investment in any platform: MODX, WP, Drupal, Joomla, Craft, Ghost, Next-Hot-CMS, has similar value and requires similar effort. So I guess the question really is: "All things equal, does a career choice to use MODX provide more or less value than another platform?"

I feel my point is being spun a bit here. This is not a philosophical question of "All things equal, does a career choice to use MODX provide more or less value than another platform?"

Quote from: sepiariver at Jun 02, 2014, 10:06 PM

I know from our discussions JP that you don't feel the same way. That's fine. But others still do. Not just me, other developers, companies, designers - there's lots of people out there who still love to use MODX...and they (we) deserve a voice and space in these forums as well

Which conversation was this? To clarify, at modmore we invest time and effort in MODX CMS and supporting premium software.

Quote from: opengeek at Jun 02, 2014, 04:59 PM

Hey Shaun! Glad to see you posting here. It's nice to know you still care about us.

Of course I care about MODX! I spent 5+ years of my life at 60+ hr weeks invested in it, sacrificing my career for it: why would I not?

Before I begin responding to the topics of this thread, I'll clear up the rumor that I have any equity stake in MODX Systems, LLC. I do not and never have had any equity stake in MODX Systems, LLC. I do however, have a huge stake in MODX the software.
I am an employee of MODX Systems, LLC and the Chief Architect of MODX. Here is my perspective on this thread.

Thanks for the clarification - that's why I said I wasn't sure. Appreciate you clearing that up.

First, the lack of posts, minimal technical roadmap direction, and general silence here are multifaceted. It is partially a result of two years of distractions that have changed the priorities for MODX Systems, LLC, especially with regard to management of the OSS project. It is also a result of focusing more on actions rather than words. Words sometimes set expectations improperly, but actions rarely do. As leaders of the MODX OSS projects, we have many times set improper expectations with words, and we sincerely want to change that. That said, we absolutely concede that communication from the project leadership must be improved.

Agree with this 100%, though I would say that it was a lot more than 2 years of distractions. One thing I have noticed in my time outside of MODX, LLC is that there is a high level of "everything is going fine" in outside comms, but internally I know this was not necessarily shared by all members. I believe firmly that a little more transparency, honesty and open communication would benefit everyone.

Despite Shaun's departure, one half of that technical leadership is still here and working hard to reinvent both MODX the OSS, and MODX the brand as stewards of that software and it's community.

I hope I didn't imply otherwise - in fact, you and I both agree that it was impossible enough with only 2 people to do all of that!

and trying to find ways to "fix" core code issues that are not just related to an aging codebase, but in many cases are the direct result of feature implementations and changes added with an attitude more akin to reckless abandon than careful planning.

1. Jason, I know you, and I know you don't mean it this way, but this is not leadership. Vague accusations to others of "reckless abandon" without allowing them to defend their reasoning, without providing specific details, and without justifying your comments with measurable data helps no one.

2. I would argue that this is startup life - the company was on tight timelines to achieve things, often while trying to balance 60+ other tasks, and compromises had to be made. Anyone who has done software engineering for a long enough time knows that you always hate your code 6 months later, and that everything has to be iterated on in time.

Our intention is to continue shifting more and more integration responsibilities to the community as this momentum continues. Once enough momentum is reached, we can begin working toward establishing open governance through a proper advisory board where membership is based on the merit of individual or corporate-sponsored contributions and other transparent factors.

Great. I know you've been for this. Please don't hear me (or Mark, I believe) out as saying this isn't the LLC's intent. My post was to clarify that I believe (from both experience inside and outside) the LLC simply does not have the resources to make this happen fast enough. Delegating these responsibilities to others in the community would be a great start. If you and others in the LLC have a vision for how this is to happen, that needs to be documented publicly and laid out as a business plan for the foundation. This will attract and allow others to take up that mantle and run with it.

They are anything but ignored by the technical leadership – just because you do not see huge strides in the commit logs, product roadmaps, or community discussions on how to best Composer-enable MODX or what pieces need to be decoupled from one another.

Yes - I know somewhere it is happening. But the problem I've seen - and many others here are commenting about - is that it's happening behind closed doors. Whether or not you intend for that to be the case or perception is irrelevant. That is the perception because there is no outside documentation, proposals, or scoping work being done that anyone can view.

I know that takes a lot more work to do that process stuff. I know that the LLC is busy. But that's my point. The LLC needs help. You have a community itching to help, but the LLC is not delegating authority to do so.

One of my admitted mistakes during MODX, LLC was telling people "if you don't like it, contribute!" way too often. This is a bad strategy. People want to help. You can see that in the millions of OSS projects out there. The problem with MODX at current is that there are no streamlined tracks to help onboard contributors. There is no "here are the specific places and roles we need help with" displayed anywhere. There is no public burndown chart of issues that the community can do sprints to to release 2.3, or 3.0. There is no detailed roadmap showing the path that all these private conversations you are having are mapping out.

I have grown a radical opinion since leaving MODX. I believe all conversations and activity about open source software should be publicly posted. This reduces confusion, improves communication, and gets rid of spin. Don't believe it's feasible? Drupal does it. Wordpress does it. The CMS's overtaking MODX right now are beginning to do it.

Doing this stuff takes time, and it takes stepping away from coding. I'm not sure the LLC is willing or able to do that at present. That's why I'm on board with a Foundation - let people help.

Hi YJ,

I feel that you may have misconstrued my position a bit, and also you are a bit incorrect on some of the business history. Apologies on the directness of this post, but I believe the community is owed some clarification.

Quote from: sepiariver at Jun 02, 2014, 07:08 PM

Two years ago, the management team was entirely different. Some have voiced concerns about not knowing the “direction” that MODX is moving towards nowadays. Well, back then, the direction was clear: Launch MODX Cloud.

Incorrect on two fronts:

1. The management was not "completely" different. Ryan was still on the executive team, and was a major voice in all decisions made.

2. The direction of the company was two-fold: "Launch MODX Cloud to fund the company that was burning through a fixed amount of cash at a breakneck pace, and simultaneously focus on developing the community and increasing marketing." It was also a lot more complex than that - time was divvied up between employees so that the product did not go stale, or lose focus or development.

To make a very long story short, “The Launch” happened, but with a huge cost. The management team, and the organization as a whole, were divided. One side wanted to push the Cloud platform ahead by any means possible, and the other side wanted to focus on growing and leading the MODX open source CMS project — something that had taken a back-seat during Cloud development. Thus the “SiphonLabs Divide” occurred.

Ok, this is where I have to step in and correct - we all sat in a room in the SoftLayer offices during the first MODX LLC meetup: all of us (Mark was there, he can attest), and agreed that we were going to take a three-pronged stance to the LLC: improve Cloud to increase revenues to fund the OSS project; define a clear roadmap for MODX and 2.3 and continue work on it; and scale the Professional Services department to be self-sustainable (which eventually happened).

John Corcoran (the CEO hired and approved by Ryan, as were all the other employees) asked all of us in that room that day, that if we disagreed with this strategy, to speak up and voice your disagreements. You were there. No one spoke up. Everyone agreed. So let's dismiss this "divided" bit; the company was aligned, or at least no one spoke up to speak their objections. All of leadership was aligned and in agreement.

I get really tired of people trying to pin the whole of MODX's stagnation on Cloud. It's flat-out not true. Cloud today provides a significant source of revenue for the LLC. Cloud enables many people in the community to test out and develop MODX. It was the only reason MODX got continued investor funding that allowed the LLC to stay in business. Without Cloud, MODX would have died. End of story - the investors were tired of funding a platform they had already burned through $2M on with no return on investment. They continued to fund the company because of Cloud, not the OS software. You can debate whether or not the direction and focus on Cloud past that was meritable on small points, but those are the facts.

Furthermore, I could spell out many, many other distractions that hurt MODX's development, if we want to go there:

- The "Jobs Listings" pages that took 2 months of development for an end return of less than $1k
- The "hosting listings" pages that took time away for also very little return
- modx.com/live, which is barely used now
- The partner program
- The forums solution, that while nice, took over 6 months of development away from the core for very little value return, when we could have just installed or purchased another application for far cheaper than the cost of dev
- A couple of failed ProServ contracts that nearly bankrupted the company, twice
- MODX University
- etc

From that point on, over a year ago, Shaun McCormick aka “splittingred” would cease to contribute to the MODX open source software. In reality, he had been focussing almost exclusively on the Cloud platform for quite some time already, but needless to say, the rapid pace of development enjoyed by Revo's early releases would not be reproduced in Shaun's absence.

Generally true, though TBH I still did occasional commits to the Revo core and to the Extras I maintained.

I also want to clear up the fact that I did this not out of choice, but out of the understanding that: 1) I was an employee of MODX, not an executive, and like any good employee I did what my boss told me to do, and 2) the company needed to make money. Cloud was making money. I wanted to get paid a paycheck.

resulted in "technical debt” that Jason's been making deposits against, bit by bit.

I think it would be good for the community to know what specific technical debt was incurred, and why it is classified as such. This might enable parts of the community to assist, rather than trying to load it all on one guy.

Sure, there's no concrete roadmap for specific features in upcoming releases, but it's certain the next release will be a MODX open source CMS!

YJ, this is spin. Not having a concrete roadmap for specific features is a flat-out failure. I say this as a former LLC employee - we did a shitty job of enumerating this more fully. But to spin it as a positive is misleading.

There's admittedly room for improvement, especially in the areas of community involvement and communication around the OS project's development, but honestly folks — we're getting there.

I would argue not fast enough, as evidenced by this thread.

Admittedly, Step 4 has been happening less rapidly than I myself would like (thus my comment about it being “too quiet”). We actually have a queue of really cool Extras that have been developed for clients, and are almost ready for release, but we just haven't been able to wrap them up for prime-time.

We're working to improve on this, but a couple have been released like Collections, and Tagger for example. If you haven't tried them out, head over to the Repo. Combined, they can be a lean, mean replacement for Articles as a blogging setup.

We've also spent a lot of client-driven hours developing a system, and a knowledge base, around highly scaled environments for MODX. This is extremely valuable know-how and feeds into the "Life Cycle" above. It also means we can help you help your clients with such needs.

YJ, this actually defends my points far more than yours - the LLC currently is acting far more like a partner or contributing agency than an OSS Foundation. It is contributing Extras, sure. But a Foundation is more concerned with getting people to contribute extras, rather than doing it themselves. A Foundation is 100% devoted to the OSS project, and nothing else. It's obvious the LLC cannot do that (for payroll reasons!), and the smart move - as many other OS CMS's have done - is to separate the business concerns.

That is what people in this thread are arguing. This is not an argument against the LLC's existence. It is simply saying - separate the OSS concerns from the LLC ones, at a legal, business operations level. This will simplify communications, motivations, and direction. [ed. note: splittingred last edited this post 12 years, 3 months ago.]

<sigh> Been here, done this. At my point in life (age and physical condition) I simply don't have the ability to take off and learn something else from scratch. And I can only contribute a little at a time, so lately I've been doing a lot more complaining than contributing (static resources, anybody?)

Nevertheless, over the last 10 years the core of this community has become the family I never had, which of course is quite a different matter than making a business decision, so my opinions on the matter really have little to offer those using MODX purely as a business choice.

For what it's worth, I trust Ryan. That's why, after much agonizing and huffing and puffing, I took the turn to the Dark Side and left Evo for Revo. Actually, Ryan's the reason why I started using Etomite in the first place. I still have a soft spot for his famous and now totally redundant method for generating rounded corners (I won't say it, Ryan!). I have my own opinions on MODX Cloud, but since I'm not anybody here's mother or grandmother and nobody asked me anyway, I do try to keep them to myself. I still trust Ryan, Jason, and to perhaps a lesser degree the new core team members that I don't feel I know as well to do the right thing by MODX itself, even if it takes some time. After all, at my age, what's two or three or five years?

The last 10 years have been a lot of fun, and I'm really looking forward to the next 10.

The problem with MODX at current is that there are no streamlined tracks to help onboard contributors. There is no "here are the specific places and roles we need help with" displayed anywhere. There is no public burndown chart of issues that the community can do sprints to to release 2.3, or 3.0. There is no detailed roadmap showing the path that all these private conversations you are having are mapping out.

I have grown a radical opinion since leaving MODX. I believe all conversations and activity about open source software should be publicly posted. This reduces confusion, improves communication, and gets rid of spin. Don't believe it's feasible? Drupal does it. Wordpress does it. The CMS's overtaking MODX right now are beginning to do it.

These are two great points (notwithstanding the use of 'onboard' as a verb, especially a transitive verb ).

I tried to make the first point almost two years ago. IIRC, I described my sense that it was like having a bunch of people working on MODX in a locked building and having one come out every so often and say, "we really need your help," then going back inside and locking the door.

Among those outside of MODX LLC, I suspect that I know more about what's happening with MODX than a lot of others do, and I still feel like I'm almost completely in the dark. I contribute by creating extras, reporting bugs, writing blog posts and documentation, and trying to help out in the forums, but when it comes to contributing to the MODX codebase itself, I have no idea what the first steps would be, what I would be working on, whether someone on the dev. team is already doing the work, or what changes are planned for upcoming versions.

The few times I've tried to get answers by looking at GitHub, I've been unable to get any real sense of what's going on because, as Shaun says, there's no detailed roadmap to guide me.

This is not to say that I don't have faith in the future of MODX. It's underlying architecture is, for the most part, spectacular. It blows many other more popular CMS platforms away.

I think that the issues have been pretty well described in this thread and many others before it, and I have faith that progress will be made on them -- hopefully sooner rather then later.

There are clearly several ways the project can move forward from here, and that discussion will no doubt continue.

In the meantime, is there also something that the community and the MODX core development team can do together to map out where the project is heading?

(notwithstanding the use of 'onboard' as a verb, especially a transitive verb).

I think it was being used as an adjective; i.e. contributors that are on board.

As far as what to work on, I just follow the old, time-honored open-source tradition of scratching an itch. Right now I have two projects on the front burner, creating and documenting the process of a new Media Source type driver (sftp to a remote file repository), and getting static resources that work with media sources. Your new ClassExtender class will come in handy there; much better than hacking the core, at least during the development stage. Hopefully it will eventually get pulled into the core. Unless, of course, somebody else gets to it first.