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

Quote from: Exceleron at Mar 28, 2013, 10:10 PM

I would also point out like "Jeroen Kenters" said the SiphonLabs logo mostly is a trademark infringement of HTML5 is some form, or at least a based off of it. If the goal is distinguished SiphonLabs from MODX why not have Dustin who is both creative and extremely talented create a logo that is standing more on it's own legs.

Actually, Dustin designed that logo. And he is the first to admit it's not 100% done and will likely be revised.

3:Transition--> So if I am understanding this correctly and I believe that I am. MODX Cloud which currently is still a child and needs to be nurtured, adjusted and get the bugs out before it is shipped off to college so to speak. What I am referring to is the introduction of WORDPRESS, JOOMLA, .... It is just to young and not ready. I agree there is room in the market for a solution that is created for large agencies to have one tool for all CMS platforms, but Cloud currently is not the solution for it's own platform so why would it try to grow further.

I'm not sure I understand - can you tell me why you feel it's not ready? I'd say that it is, with us having a large number of production sites currently in the system, and a large, satisfied userbase.

However MODX professional services for open source is.

This is not totally correct; the ProServ department could fund its engineers (working full-time on ProServ work and not on the product) and a tiny bit more to fund other operating costs. It's worth it to note that we did the ProServ route for MODX for 2+ years prior to the Cloud system. The Cloud system came about because the ProServ system wasn't raising enough to fund the business as a whole.

*spluttering*

okay. SEVERAL of us wanted to do a "Learn MODX" site and we actually bought the domain modxbeginners.com (which we now have let go) because we were specifically told by MODX we could not use it. So I'm really sort of mystified, is that now suddenly ok?

We support both mom-and-pops and medium AND yes, even some large businesses. Nonprofits, artists. We run the gamut. Without question they all love MODX once they use it, but user education is lacking. We're all agreed. I have a pastor that went nuts modifying the basic Evo site we did for their church.

Market research was....? I'm really interested in knowing that because to me, Enterprise doesn't seem all that different than Cloud. It's Cloud with secret sauce. I know you all have secret sauce. I can name several plugins/scripts off the top of my head that you all use that could be or could become standard for it. Low cost sites with ad models? Information products? How about letting us who want to do education sites lease rights to do so? Give royalties? Are you seriously claiming all other options have been explored? Selling plugins?

How much is enough to make? How much do you need to bring in? Do you really think moving sites from dedicated hosting to Cloud is reasonable for those of us with dedicated managed servers? You do realize there are cPanel to cPanel tools to move sites that are infinitely easier than the cPanel process outlined on Cloud? I think the snapshot is awesome. I think the platform and your work on it is great. I'm not dissing the platform. But I know we need a full server. So I'm scratching my head wondering how this is going to work. I just think this transition has been grossly mishandled.

it is what it is. I'm very unhappy with the way this was done. What you're saying sounds perfectly reasonable unless you've been here a while and have heard the song and dance before. I'm not going to discuss it further, you all have chosen a direction and are going the way you're going to go. I'm not interested in furthering strife. I think this is a huge mistake.

Trust and integrity matter. My trust is waning. This house is divided and I think that has more to do with this direction than anything else. Everyone's been trying to be polite about it but the elephant is in the room. I don't think it had to be this way and if things had been handled differently, it wouldn't have been. You could have done things much differently and achieved the same results. My support is and will be fully with MODX. When I come to Cloud/ProServ and am told not to approach other staff, there is a culture problem. I don't believe Siphon is going to support MODX because of the way things have been handled to date. We have heard promises and plans before, only to have events unfold differently. I wish you luck and hope you prove me wrong, but I'm going to be watching what Siphon does, not what Siphon says.

peace.

Quote from: redtoad at Mar 29, 2013, 03:10 AM

okay. SEVERAL of us wanted to do a "Learn MODX" site and we actually bought the domain modxbeginners.com (which we now have let go) because we were specifically told by MODX we could not use it. So I'm really sort of mystified, is that now suddenly ok?

To my knowledge, the brand limitations explicitly state that is not allowed, but I'm not part of that arm of the MODX Systems business and can't comment on that.

Without question they all love MODX once they use it, but user education is lacking. We're all agreed.

Anne, you've hit a great point here. User docs are seriously lacking for MODX. I've called for help on that before, and we got a little bit of it, but to be honest we need a *lot* more.

Market research was....? I'm really interested in knowing that because to me, Enterprise doesn't seem all that different than Cloud.

We did a side-by-side analysis of all the major Enterprise CMS systems out there, what their challenges were and how they approached them, and then what we would need to enter the enterprise space (24/7 support, for instance, is a large one). As for tech, we would have needed more e-commerce integration, a more integrated search system, better clustering support, a large support team, and a ton other things I can't remember off the top of my head right now. Frankly, we didn't have the funds or people to take on such an endeavor, and we weren't really able to get any investors to show interest in funding it.

It's Cloud with secret sauce. I know you all have secret sauce.

I can promise you, the only secret sauce I have is my salsa recipe.

I can name several plugins/scripts off the top of my head that you all use that could be or could become standard for it.

Could you elaborate which ones? I'm curious.

How about letting us who want to do education sites lease rights to do so?

I definitely don't think that's off the table. If that's been the impression you've been given, let's try and rectify that, because I don't think that's the intent at all.

Give royalties? Are you seriously claiming all other options have been explored?

All the other options that we've tried over the past 3 years - a partner program, proserv work, job listing/services market, enterprise modx, etc...all have not been able to either: A) raise enough revenue to support at least 4 people (seriously, none have even come close to more than 1 person) or B) been able to be developed at a low enough initial capital for us to be able to afford them.

Selling plugins?

I would *love* to have this in MODX (and Cloud!) right now. But to be honest, it's difficult as hell to do. We'd have to have an integrated billing system that can not only collect payments, but also distribute end revenues to each individual Extra seller. We'd have to have a *secure* way of collecting those payments (which I can assure you someone's MODX manager on a shared host without SSL is not). We'd have to have some way of 'DRM' (I know that's a dirty word, but go along with me) to prevent people from just downloading it once and sharing/linking it and ruining the whole model (we almost got this with private package management providers, but were a bit short with it).

How much is enough to make? How much do you need to bring in?

The infrastructure alone costs more than $20,000 a month, if I remember right. Add to that software engineer salaries for 8-10 people, and some other miscellaneous services costs (billing processing, analytics, support software, etc etc), and it gets to about $1M a year.

Do you really think moving sites from dedicated hosting to Cloud is reasonable for those of us with dedicated managed servers?

Oh, no, not at all. We realize Cloud right now is not for everyone, and we're fine with that.

You do realize there are cPanel to cPanel tools to move sites that are infinitely easier than the cPanel process outlined on Cloud?

Yes, but can cPanel *just* move the Templates, TVs and Chunks in your site? Can it just move the users? Can it do it in one click? Can it allow you to create specific MODX-site templates that you can use in every next project you do? We're trying to solve the age-old designer problem of life-cycle management while still allowing people to use the tools they want to.

But I know we need a full server. So I'm scratching my head wondering how this is going to work.

So stay on your full server! We totally understand! (For now, until we offer a VPS-like solution later on)

I just think this transition has been grossly mishandled.
it is what it is. I'm very unhappy with the way this was done.

Can I ask how you would have done it? I'm being sincere, I'd like to know.

When I come to Cloud/ProServ and am told not to approach other staff, there is a culture problem.

I am not aware of any policy that might cause this to happen, and am unsure why this happened; tbh this doesn't sound right to me. Perhaps you could elaborate in a PM?

but I'm going to be watching what Siphon does, not what Siphon says.

I hope you do! I have always iterated that accountability for promises is what MODX has sorely needed. Promising people rainbows does nothing good for anyone.

Anne, I sincerely appreciate your candor. I really do. I hope you'll give us a bit of grace in this transition - and I promise you that my yes means yes and my no means no here. We're trying to simply create a funding base for MODX to survive and thrive. That's it. We're not out to get rich here (if that was the case, I would not be working in Open Source and would have left long ago). We're out to just make sure the people we employ can pay their rent and take care of their families.

We're here to make sure that in 6 months MODX can still afford to pay its bills so that it can grow. That's it. If there's a viable, proven way that we can raise the capital in to fund MODX CMS development for the next year without having to work on Cloud, I would be 120% for it and would stop everything to do it. The problem right now is that way doesn't exist in any real shape other than people having "gut feelings" or "hopes" that "growth" might work. And to be really honest, I can't pay my mortgage with promises and hopes.

So, as a few people here have noted - it's going to take the community really stepping up and helping with dev, doc and press contributions to grow MODX; the core team has to work on creating a solid funding base to fund the costs that it takes to grow a large CMS system and community. And, personally, I believe the MODX community can get there. Are we there yet? Candidly, no. Can we get there? Yes. Absolutely. But it's going to take everyone. And it's going to be hard.

But who said doing crazy things that change the future of content management and building the web was easy?

Quote from: splittingred at Mar 29, 2013, 03:47 AM

So, as a few people here have noted - it's going to take the community really stepping up and helping with dev, doc and press contributions to grow MODX; the core team has to work on creating a solid funding base to fund the costs that it takes to grow a large CMS system and community. And, personally, I believe the MODX community can get there. Are we there yet? Candidly, no. Can we get there? Yes. Absolutely. But it's going to take everyone. And it's going to be hard.

I agree that the community needs to step up, myself included. Is there a place where all of this is coordinated? I know Github is the place for code, but beyond that, it seems there's a lot of non-code stuff that needs coordination. As well, a bit of a roadmap with something like "here's where we're going, here are the pieces that make it up, and here are our priorities" and then the community members can step up with more help, knowing how the small little pieces roll up to the whole... it would also make for some really cool graphic progress reports, but that's just the biz-knob business intelligence guy in me talking.

Perhaps all of this already exists, but I just haven't seen it or looked for it well enough.

Quote from: stalemate at Mar 29, 2013, 03:59 AM

Is there a place where all of this is coordinated? I know Github is the place for code, but beyond that, it seems there's a lot of non-code stuff that needs coordination.

Outside of this forum and Redmine (bugs.modx.com), there's not. There needs to be. Desparately. Whether that's here, or in RTFM, or in Redmine, in my mind, it doesn't matter.

Perhaps you could elaborate as to what specifically you'd want to see more of. Code-wise that's a bit easier; there is a roadmap. As for other stuff, most of it is in the forums.

Quote from: splittingred at Mar 29, 2013, 04:04 AM

Perhaps you could elaborate as to what specifically you'd want to see more of. Code-wise that's a bit easier; there is a roadmap. As for other stuff, most of it is in the forums.

Thanks for the link.. I had seen that before at some point in time. Since I'm hardly a MODX guru, not a lot of the features which are on that roadmap really stood out at me, simply because I don't understand their implications.

In terms of collaboration for the non-code side of things, I think of my day job. We put together a list of requirements, tasks to accomplish it, and then assign resources to this. Usually, being tool people, we're apt to do hundreds of hours of research to try to find that one tool by an exhaustive process of software evaluation, selection and then implementation. I personally think that would be a mistake (though I have been wrong before); instead, something simple as a list of tasks and a contact for resource assignment and deadlines. I think you already have a similar process for lexicon entry translations.

In terms of how this actually gets implemented, I think once the requirements and tasks are laid out, share it and have some kind of volunteer sign-up where people list what they think they would be able to do, what kind of time commitments they are able to make. Not to overly complicate things, but when you deal with a geographically diverse group, it also helps to have some kind of peer review process to ensure the vision isn't being lost between stating what is needed and what is delivered.

This should, at some point in time, all be authorized through Ryan and Jay to make sure that the vision, tasks and their deliverables are in line with the MODX vision. I think they need to have the final word on vision more than anyone in the community.

As for the idea with showing progress, I find that the use of a graph or some kind of graphic representation of information very powerful and motivating. Case in point, your Github graph showing commits from you and Jason versus everyone else. I think something showing progress to a release really helps to motivate people, just like a thermometer for fund raising helps show progress towards a goal. But please let's not create a thermometer-- it's really overused.

I guess in short what I'd like to say is that given the passion of the community towards the tool, I know there's a lot of us who want to contribute more, and the easier we can pull it all together, the faster we can get to MODX3.

You know, project management is a huge component of OpenSource that we could do better on. I wrote my senior thesis on the Benefits of OpenSource and one thing I kept coming across in my research was the role of management in successfully OpenSource project. Firefox (I wrote the paper in 2007, ok) was used as an example or organizing being crucial in the success of the project.

For one, I'd +1 on taking a serious looking at moving to Github for bug tracking, etc.

Selling plugins?

I would *love* to have this in MODX (and Cloud!) right now. But to be honest, it's difficult as hell to do. We'd have to have an integrated billing system that can not only collect payments, but also distribute end revenues to each individual Extra seller. We'd have to have a *secure* way of collecting those payments (which I can assure you someone's MODX manager on a shared host without SSL is not). We'd have to have some way of 'DRM' (I know that's a dirty word, but go along with me) to prevent people from just downloading it once and sharing/linking it and ruining the whole model (we almost got this with private package management providers, but were a bit short with it).

You don't need DRM, no matter what you do people will find a way around it, but these people are not your customers anyway. The pirate is locked out of support, documentation and will be slow to get updates.

Focus on making a vapor style site package more user friendly and modx will thrive on sites like theme forest. Modx has huge potential for this as you are not just selling themes, but the complete customised back end.

Here is what would (in my opinion) make MODX CMS take off big time:

Rewrite everything with well established framework (Symfony 2) - this would enlarge community by order of magnitude, bring a lot quality devs (contributors) to table and I am sure it would be quite some news in php in general. That can raise revenue, do research in that direction.

MODX 3 is great opportunity to do this.

Kind of off-topic but I think it's healthier to regard WordPress, Drupal, ProcessWire, Silverstipe etc as "contemporaries" and not necessarily " competitors".

I see it kinda like the music industry. if my favourite bands came out and started talking about other bands as their "competitors" and wanting to be "the only friggin band on the planet" , I'd be quickly listening to some other tunes.

Sure, you can argue that MODX and Drupal are competing for user numbers, revenue, dev talent etc etc but equally you can look at this whole industry as being populated by insanely talented, passionate people who care first and foremost about making great products. There will never be just one CMS and I don't know many designers or Devs that truly use just a single platform. There will always be other platforms and we can learn a lot from their products, processes and communities.

Again, back to the music industry, I see a huge amount of collaboration and support in some of the genres I listen to. Bands that write together, tour together and share ideas are much, much better artists than those that shut themselves off and focus solely on "sounding better than our competitors".

I hope MODX continues to grow and develop on its own merits and is continuously exposed to the merits of other CMS too. it can only make MODX a better platform.

hope that makes sense