MODX - Does it have a future ?

I've scanned over this post and thought I would throw in my 2 cents.

To be honest, I have no idea why MODX isn't way more popular amongst web devs and designers.

Sure, the layman cant set up a site straight out of the box like Wordpress, but for anyone in the web industry worth their salt this isn't an issue.

I like how clean and straight forward it is. With WP I cant stand the bloatedness or digging through someone else's code that hasn't been updated in 5 years. With MODX I can just build it properly, not mashing together bits and pieces of plugins and themes. Why isn't this more appealing to the web community?

Quote from: sottwell at Jun 02, 2016, 09:29 PM

I liked Grav, I just hope they outgrow their use of exec and shell_exec. They seemed to think everybody should have their own servers, or at least a VPS to be able to control their server configuration.

But ofcourse they should!
On a more serious note - Grav is Composer-based and has its own package manager, so clean modern PHP app environment and shell access make sense...

Quote from: meltingdog at Jun 14, 2016, 07:11 PM

To be honest, I have no idea why MODX isn't way more popular amongst web devs and designers.

In my opinion, MODX isn't as popular as it should be because the Manager interface is not accessible and is not very user friendly. If we can make the Next Manager truly accessible and mobile friendly, I think a conservative estimate would be MODX becoming 10x more popular. Only time will tell!

Quote from: dinocorn at Jul 25, 2016, 08:07 AM

Quote from: meltingdog at Jun 14, 2016, 07:11 PM

To be honest, I have no idea why MODX isn't way more popular amongst web devs and designers.

In my opinion, MODX isn't as popular as it should be because the Manager interface is not accessible and is not very user friendly. If we can make the Next Manager truly accessible and mobile friendly, I think a conservative estimate would be MODX becoming 10x more popular. Only time will tell!

True. If it were up to me I would:

- Rename 'Resources' to 'Pages' (we know they're not technically pages, but laypersons think of them this way)
- Rename the Template Variables tab to something like 'Extra page information' and maybe even move it to be below the Content textarea
- Simplify the image upload system.
- Resources search, and maybe someway to automatically sort resources by name or ID (on the Manager)
- Maybe allow uploading screen shots of templates so users know how they will look when selecting them
- A step by step 'wizard' for adding new users

I think the biggest downside to modx is the creation of extensions. I've tried and given up a few times. It's a very complicated process...

@vdriver - some extensions can be created pretty easily with PackMan.

I use MyComponent. It takes some getting used to, but I can create an extra with it in less than 20 minutes, plus the time it takes to write and test the code. I created a complete extra package from scratch (with lexicon strings) in a demo at MODXpo in 15 minutes. Sadly, the video of my presentation was lost.

Quote from: BobRay at Jul 25, 2016, 11:23 PM

@vdriver - some extensions can be created pretty easily with PackMan.

I use MyComponent. It takes some getting used to, but I can create an extra with it in less than 20 minutes, plus the time it takes to write and test the code. I created a complete extra package from scratch (with lexicon strings) in a demo at MODXpo in 15 minutes. Sadly, the video of my presentation was lost.

Hmmmm. I may just have to take a look at them. It's been a while since I've delved into that area, so I should probably look again. Pity about the video. Tutorials like that are a big help.

Quote from: vrdriver at Jul 25, 2016, 09:24 PM

I think the biggest downside to modx is the creation of extensions. I've tried and given up a few times. It's a very complicated process...

Are you talking about creating addons that can be added to the MODX depository for downloading and installing by the public? If not, and you are talking about creating CMPs for clients (that you can reuse, of course), then it's not complicated at all. I create all sorts of CMPs using plain old PHP and HTML, and I'm then not at all limited by the typical structures used in the manager; it's true "creative freedom". It takes me less than 5 minutes to set a new one up in the manager, then I can just focus on coding. It's not at all necessary to use extJS for this; for me, that's where complication would come in.

Quote from: sottwell at Nov 26, 2015, 02:37 AM

Revo is moving towards version 3, which will among other things involve using Composer for dependency management. Using Semantic Versioning, this means that there will be breaking changes from version 2. However, 2.5 and maybe even 2.6 (non-breaking feature changes) as well as a number of minor bug fixes and patches will be released as well.

The basic functionality won't change, just improvements in management of upgrades and dependencies, simplification of customizing Manager pages, things like that.

Excuse me. Can I ask? Do you still think, that MODx 3 will come ?

Quote from: tarzanpasha at Nov 28, 2016, 04:48 PM

Excuse me. Can I ask? Do you still think, that MODx 3 will come ?

The "Next big thing" for MODX was commonly referred to as MODX 3 in the past. Now, MODX 3.x is going to be the familiar UI and platform with Composer and other updates. In other words it might have some amazing changes but many of them are "under the hood". MODX 4.x will feature a rebuilt manager, probably still on top of the Revolution PHP architecture.

This is all recent news. You can check out the Announcement of the MAB post and follow the MAB Recommendations on GitHub. Don't let 4.x version bump bum you out to much. We aren't opposed at all to a 4.x alpha soon following a 3.x release.

https://modx.com/community/modx-advisory-board/mab-charter
https://github.com/modxcms/mab-recommendations