Quote from: vamporio at Mar 28, 2013, 09:31 PMWhy not asking for a 5$ or 10$-donation at the download (-> and for motivation, you can add the newly created modx-website with rel follow, a ascreenshot and a small description to a catalogue of MODX-made websites on modx.com for your donation ---- or someting like that)?
There is a donate page on the site
http://modx.com/company/wall-of-fame/support-modx/ but it's somewhat buried. Personally, I think a new donation programme along the lines you suggested could be more effective.
I would hope the creating of SiphonLabs
https://angel.co/siphonlabs will result in the removal of the prominence of Cloud on the MODX homepage and it being reworked to focus on the open source/community aspect of MODX. This woule be an ideal time to implement a new core team donation programme. My own take on a donation scheme would involve encouraging developers, whether large, small or one-man bands, to donate a percentage (say 1%, 5% or whatever) of any fee/profit they may make from a developing a site for a client to the core development team.
Focusing on high value enterprise may well be the correct strategy for shorter term monetisation of an open source product but I feel that expanding the smaller developer and enthusiast users is the key to long term survival in the sense of an open source CMS and also the talked about premium add-ons (which I feel are crucial to MODX user and contributor expansion). You need a critical mass of users to make the development of such things at least potentially financially viable.
redtoad stated above "we had to decide if we were going to serve mom and pops or go after enterprise customers". 'Mom and pops' could bring that critical mass level of users but I really don't think that is where MODX sits best. Altering the product to cater for such users would probably mean compromising the inherent strengths of MODX.
I think a critical mass user influx could be better achieved targeting the personal enthusiast market. People who now may use something like WordPress to develop personal sites, who are quite capable of a bit of hand coding and could be creating much better sites in MODX given a learning introduction through knowledge bases and tutorials. In my experience of talking to such people, WordPress or Joomla is used because it's a well known platform with lots of plugins to add the feature they want. They can build a site working in a reasonable (but sometimes compromised) way but when it comes to getting it to work in the exact way they would like, that means doing customisation to the CMS/plugin code which is rather complicated and inflexible and that it's beyond them. For this sort of user the flexibility of MODX would be perfect and enable them to create sites that work in the exact way they envision, BUT the initial learning curve is hindered by documentation that can be hard to pick through and understand for a newbie. The first MODX site is a slow process compared to other CMSs. That could be remedied for this type of user by an new style of documentation without compromising the strengths of the CMS by pandering to the plug and play type expectation.
[ed. note: absent42 last edited this post 11 years, 1 month ago.]
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