[Revo] Mobile Manager, anyone?

I would have to agree with bridgecourt, an add-on like this takes a lot of development time funding the project well help Mark meet the end goal, drop current commitments to make sure the project is a success and afterwards there is always the need for ongoing support and enhancements so the annual license fee seems appropriate.

That said a lot of people use MODx for two reasons

1) It’s the best
2) It’s free

A lot of people might be put off by the $50 a year cost, to me it’s a worthwhile cost if it gives me and my clients flexibility to look after their sites via mobile.

Also for the $500 donation people may be put off by the return 20 years free licensing in this day and age its hard for things to last thing long.

It also might be worthwhile for you to run a survey find out how many users want a mobile enabled manager, what key features and then base your costings on this.

Keep up the good work I’ll be donating

Aaron

Thanks for taking the time to reply Aaron


I agree with the best and free part, and I’m giving people the opportunity to also use it for free (but with a attributions for those that contributed). That gives me some advantages as well: I can simply distribute it through the package manager (reaching a larger audience and giving the users simplicity), with some scripts in there checking the license and hiding the attribution if the license checks out.


The 20 years of free licensing can be allocated to different licenses keys. The way I envision to use this is by giving those who contributed a login on the website where they can manage their licensing codes. They have a number of unallocated years which can then be assigned a license key. You could set a key to be valid for one year, set a few to be valid for four years and keep the rest unallocated until you get another client who wants mobile editing and give him three years. Unallocated license years don’t expire, so you can leave ’m stacked.

The same would happen when purchasing new licenses: you can buy 10 in one go (and save eg 10% on the total price) and allocate them over different licenses.


The survey was actually the discussion in this topic. The crowdsourcing will be the actual test to see how many people are willing to invest. If I don’t reach the goal, it wont be a priority and may take years to develop.

Hi Mark,

I totally forgot about the free part. Now that you have explained the 20 years of licensing and how it can be allocated to say 20 websites is a lot more attractive to hear.

Perhaps the wording needs to be adjusted

Donations of $500 or more - will receive 20 site licenses which you could either use for up to 20 websites or you could use the licenses to renew your site license each year

Another thought and sorry if I missed it earlier is that I personally see a lot of customers who love to brand MODx i.e. their business logo etc so branding options would be an added plus if they were to take out a license.

Aaron

Ah, will do that. Is indeed a little vague.

I’ll keep the custom company branding in mind and perhaps add it in as another advantage of licensing. Thanks for the idea

Not sure if it’ll be in the first PL release though, will need to give it more thought. Okay, made up my mind. (lol 45 mins later :p) IMO it’s too much of an advantage not to do this. It may be basic in the first versions (just a logo), but could be extended over time to allow customizing your UI totally.

Okay.. it’s almost time to put this to action. Been getting quite some feedback, and really am thankful for the insight in the future of MODX the core team has given me in order to know what I’m getting myself in to

Now on to some details on the crowdfunding and some considerations I’ve been making:
- Rockethub doesn’t seem to like paypal, so that’s out of the question.
- Crowdfunder is nice in that it allows you to do an all-or-nothing approach, which transfers money back if the goal isn’t reached.. big downside is that you need to signup, and I don’t want that to be needed.
- IndieGoGo is easier in that respect, but decides to take 5% of the funded amount (on top of processing fees from the funders) and 9% if it’s not succesfully founded.
- Another option is the dead simple ChipIn. Nothing more than a flash app, it keeps track of donations in a widget and sends ’m to paypal right away. And heck.. if funding fails, I can transfer it all back to the funders myself. Doesn’t need a sign up, and not even paypal if you have a creditcard, costs nothing and can be put on any website/blog to draw attention to it.


In conclusion... ChipIn has my preference at this point. And I’d like to kick off the crowdfunding campaign coming Monday! We’ll also "launch" the website then which is being worked on this weekend, based of a somewhat modified ThemeForest template. It should have a plethora of information for you by then to dig in and see if you could help fund it.

Hosting & Domainname has been provided by Skytoaster (Patrick & Sal) and they’re also very much involved in setting up the website. Thanks guys Really appreciate all that you’re doing!

While I’m at it I also want to shout out to Crawford for feeding the random thought I had a while back and the endless talks about MODX and possibilities on funding development, of which this will be the pilot. And of course for the name HandyMan Thanks C!

(And thanks for everyone for making this what it is now.. all the feedback, ideas and suggestions are great and it’s one thing that sets this community apart. If I would be wearing a hat I’d take it off for you all.)

EDIT: Sal suggested to make a donation thingy in MODX, and that’s actually a great idea to automate the process of giving out licenses when it’s done.. Great thinking! We’ll be discussing / coding / doing stuff tomorrow to see if we can make it work

I don’t know if it’s too late, but may I vote for Sencha Touch ?

Based on ExtJs 4, Sencha Touch is a potential great framework.
Both jquerymobile and Sencha Touch are in the alpha stage, though.
But ST has stepped further by supporting Gyro (well, honestly, I’ve not find the jQuery’s doc on that matter).
Their documentation are also much different.
Plus, the Sencha Touch’s Visual Developer Tools.

Just my $0.02

If I recall correctly the logic behind jQuery mobile is the drastically smaller file size, the standard html, and the support of older phones (aka Marks Phone).

Quote from: AMDbuilder at Mar 11, 2011, 03:30 AM

If I recall correctly the logic behind jQuery mobile is the drastically smaller file size, the standard html, and the support of older phones (aka Marks Phone).

Pretty much. lol

jQuery Mobile enhances HTML5 markup with CSS3 and jQuery (incl UI), so even when JS is not available it works.
Sencha Touch may have more functionality out of the box, but the page source (body) is nothing more than an empty div. What happens is that the page and all the resources load, and then the device needs to process all the javascript to build the layout in all its fancyness. jQuery mobile is functional either way, but adds functionality to (already rendered) semantic html with the javascript.


Also, in regards to the file size.. the jQuery docs/demo transfers 72.88kb, where the Sencha Touch js alone 246.34kb...

Site launched! Please check out http://www.modxmobile.com - a lot of time went into that over the weekend and would love feedback!


Crowdfunding topic on these forums: http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,62261.0.html


Please, if you can, help make this addon/application a reality by co-funding the development Check out the website for details on how to donate!

Nice looking site, just added a donation.

Aaron