Answered Evolution or Revolution for large international site?

I think Evo will do just fine for you. The latest versions are quite good, and development is moving right along. The Russian and Japanese communities have a lot to contribute, so I think it will continue to advance. Version 1.0.11 has some really nice features. Plus, there's so far nothing as nice as YAMS for multilanguage sites for Revo. Contexts and Babel work, but it's just not as nice.

If it's truly going to a big project with lots of custom work I would definitely do it with Revolution. Especially if you are going to use custom tables and even more so if there will be registration/members on the site. Oh, and Revolutions native support to subsites may be a very big thing too.

I have build one very large map based custom project with Evolution and I have to say it would have been a lot easier to develop it further with Revolution.

Quote from: Paavo at Aug 22, 2013, 12:23 PM

Thanks for replies.
Lammikko, I know you are very advanced with Evolution, but I don't know how much you have an experience with Revolution? I just want to know how well you can compare these two versions of MODX.

I have "played" with Revolution quite a lot though I have not build a single production site/project with it. As I see it, Revolution API is far superior in every way compared to Evolution and also the usage of custom tables is much better handled and thought.

With Evolution you are pretty much left alone when it comes to custom tables or more advances API interaction. It's very easy to use custom tables and even extend the API with your own classes, but the problem for me was that I was nearing to the point that it would have been wiser to build the whole thing from the scratch with some pure PHP framework - not CMS/lightCMF that MODx Evolution is.

I'd go with Revo because it's multilingual right out of the box. See Internationalization. We have no problems doing multilingual sites without any extensions but rather natively in Revo.

We include a lexicon file for common elements of a website that are going to be translate (whereas we leave content and template variables open because users can input their copy in the applicable language).

For example, if we have a blog section we want to keep the blog title consistent across multiple sites using different languages we'd use code something like this:



If the Context setting for the context is say "en" then the line of code above would go into the core/lexicon/en folder and then find the file called company.inc.php (i.e. topic=`company`).

In the company.inc.php file we just have a bunch of declaration with the correct text in the appropriate language such as:



So for a French site, we have a file called company.inc.php in the core/lexicon/fr folder with the context setting of language = fr and it would pick up the file from that folder and in that file we would have something like:



So you have to think of where to put the lexicon references of course.