MODX Core development team abandoning MODX development as 1st priority? Please read!

Having raised my family and moved into semi-retirement, I can perfectly understand the need to provide a revenue stream to support the young families that the MODx Team (I'll always consider all of you that, no matter what branding solutions you come up with) is made up of. And as long as MODx continues to soldier on, Evo, Revo, MODX 3, whatever, its developers do need to somehow not just make a living, but bring in enough to add more full-time developers to realize their vision of what MODx will become. This trust in this community is why I finally made the switch from Evo to Revo, after some years of stubbornly resisting the need to keep moving or die. So I'll continue to trust that the vision of Ryan in particular that brought us this far will continue to move us right along.

Quote from: sottwell at Mar 28, 2013, 04:20 AM

Having raised my family and moved into semi-retirement, I can perfectly understand the need to provide a revenue stream to support the young families that the MODx Team (I'll always consider all of you that, no matter what branding solutions you come up with) is made up of. And as long as MODx continues to soldier on, Evo, Revo, MODX 3, whatever, its developers do need to somehow not just make a living, but bring in enough to add more full-time developers to realize their vision of what MODx will become. This trust in this community is why I finally made the switch from Evo to Revo, after some years of stubbornly resisting the need to keep moving or die. So I'll continue to trust that the vision of Ryan in particular that brought us this far will continue to move us right along.

Hi Susan - Thank you. Your support as a long term community leader and now Revo convert (!), is very much appreciated.

Quote from: splittingred at Mar 28, 2013, 02:45 AM

Quote from: smashbrand at Mar 28, 2013, 01:16 AM

But we do a lot of innovative things where we need full system access. I want FTP, shell, the ability to sub domain framework, etc. For me and our clients its about the CMS, not the cloud....it's too sandboxed for our needs.

Hi Kevin,

Just to clarify, we do give full SFTP, SSH, shell and subdomains for all non-lab Clouds. (Free Lab Clouds get SFTP-only for security reasons.) Is there something specific you're missing that we don't currently offer from a CLI perspective?

I'll have to give it another look. I paid for a month but left after the first few mins deploying an instance. I did not see anyway other than the cloud UI / MODx UI to get anything done. I was hoping for a screen that would give me the SFTP / SSH and possibly phpMyAdmin. Like a Linode cloud instance but "awesomer". This is off topic, I can start a different question thread. I will be much more excited

When I was first introduced to MODX I was under the impression it was a large company with several dozen developers focusing on Revolution alone. It's not. In fact if you look at the number of core developers and relatively low community involvement it's unbelievable that Revolution is what it is today. I haven't met Shaun or Jason in person yet and until I do I'll continue to reserve judgement that they are in fact individual human beings.

One thing I'm excited about with SyphonLab, is the that news users that might of never even heard of MODX will be able to easily compare it side by side with other technologies. MODX is still a bit of a best kept secret, so I think SyphonLab introducing other communities to the capabilities of Revolution (as well as the areas it currently lacks in) is only going to help.

Quote from: splittingred at Mar 28, 2013, 02:42 AM

Quote from: flinx777 at Mar 27, 2013, 11:58 PM

If you're a MODX user, you need to read this post as it's very important to the future of MODX:
Am I understanding the posting correctly that the core MODX team is going to now focus on hosting? And hosting for multiple platforms that aren't even the speciality of the team?

Similar to other companies, we will be offering a service around MODX that helps assist users in their web development hosting needs. The "Core Team" is not going to "shift focus", but rather I will be working more on Cloud for the time being - which, to be frank, has been the case for the past 8 months now.

...

Thank goodness you mentioned the MODX Professional Services team in there that's been working their asses off to help support MODX and Cloud ... oh hang on ... :p

Finding a sustainable revenue model is a much understood need, however I question the extended need to support other solutions in that mix or at least to make that even a priority consideration at this point. As a person that's been pushing and championing Modx as an alternative to other platforms to large institutions, most Fortune 500 companies, I do have concerns in how this positions ModX to the public.

I took the surveys, not intending for the selection of other solutions to be supported by the same service I get from ModX, but as a benchmark to strive for in service offerings. What I expect is Cloud to strive for the same level of feature sets and pricing structures as the others. I do not expect an all encompassing solution, which is why we have niche markets that do so well. In my opinion by supporting other solutions you've now just made yourself no different than the other brand name services that everyone knows already.

What I want:
I want specialized and focus services just for ModX...
I want quality over saturation that focuses on performance and security of ModX...
I want knowledge expertise at the most granular level on ModX...

-- there are many hosting services make Cloud the best for ModX.

By throwing in support for more solutions to the mix those all become a very daunting task and presumably a loss of focus by pure numbers. I can tell you that I would not look to ModX to support or be knowledge experts of Wordpress, Joomla, Magento, DotNetNuke, Hippo, Typo3, etc. as I would not expect them to be of ModX.

In our ever diverse technology arena there are so many solutions that focus on providing specialized services which usually are the industry leaders for that service. In such cases that is where, as consultant, you will always direct clients the "best" solution not one that does it all for the sake of consolidation. Consolidation would be great, but to be practical its just not the best solution for the diversification of offerings that are available in the market today.

I do find great relief that the founding members Ryan, Jason, and Shaun are still committed to this as I believe the rest of the community supporting ModX is as well. I'm confident that better things are on the horizon and the more the community plays a role in that the easier it will make it for the project as a whole.

Big thanks again to all the ModX core team members and community for making ModX what it is....

Cheers

Regardless of the outcome of whatever happens, the core devs and MODX will always have my undivided support.

I think that with MODX cloud done, dusted and pasted on, MODX core development can do back to what it used to be.

I do think there has been far too much of a push for cloud as of late. Let the new company deal with that, and give MODX.com its home page back!

Maybe i did read that post a little different than most yesterday, but i was actually like: "Finally!".

Bringing back the core focus to modx and it's continuous development, is in my opinion the best thing for modx right now.
The cloud has had far too much attention to begin with, though i can see why after splittingred's reply to this thread.

The way i see it is that now modx and cloud are separated, and both have their own focus on their product, wich is something i like.

Modx and it's devs and the community will have my undivided support, always.

Having said the above, i do think that it would be good to brainstorm about branding modx more.

PS: I am attending a tech session this afternoon from wich i know they have fututre spots available for learning and speaking purposes. I could possibly suggest to have a speaker there for modx or maybe doing it myself when handed the proper promo material and stuff?

Modx cloud is a fantastic product, and by using it I feel in a very small way we are ensuring the future of modx. That said I am not thrilled about sending clients mysite.mycompany.siphonlabs.com urls !

The frequency of extras and forum participation is at an all time high, I really would not worrying about the future of modx.

Hopefully the focus on modx3 will be on simplifying the process of developing extras and CMPs. [ed. note: eighthday last edited this post 11 years ago.]

Your reply is likely to be, why not just make MODX better so that WP and Magento (et al) aren't needed? While this sounds great in theory, as a core dev I can say this is not realistic at this time. Why? Because the "Core Team" for the past 3 years has been Jason and I - two people.

No, the question is going to be, why not make MODX better so its community grows, and your target market does as well. WP and Magento are fine products for what they do, and yes, people use them alongside MODX. And to make it possible to run them alongside MODX, you don't have to create a complete new platform. Just extend snapshots to also package non-MODX content and add the ability to have multiple databases (as not every other 3rd party system has a configurable table prefix).

Similar to other companies, we will be offering a service around MODX that helps assist users in their web development hosting needs. The "Core Team" is not going to "shift focus", but rather I will be working more on Cloud for the time being - which, to be frank, has been the case for the past 8 months now.

Yep, the graphs back that up. https://github.com/modxcms/revolution/graphs/contributors
[ed. note: markh last edited this post 11 years ago.]