MODX - Does it have a future ?

I am opening this discussion / question to get some clarity on what is happening with MODX and whether or not it's worth staying or moving on.

I have been using MODX since the end of 2005 and have been happy being a part of the user community and part of the forum.

Not being a developer I help where I can, the majority of time it's with helping others in the forum and helping out as a forum moderator.

The past couple of years have in my opinion been up and down with MODX, no real transparency as to what is going on.

There was talk about a new and improved MODX 3, the best of Revo + Evo - but where is it.

Being an avid user of Evo, I was glad that some of the community members took it on, but that seems to have fallen away as well - updates are now rare, but the community are calling in with loads of problems due to PHP 5.5+ and the not so compatible Evo code.

Question 1: Is evo now a dead project ?

Looking at Revo, a lot of the time I see questions relating to blank sites, upgrade / update problems, problems moving from one server to the next - the list goes on and on.

Revo is supposedly, like Evo being made redundant by the LLC, but looking at all of the problems with it, is this the right path to follow.

Question 2: Is it worth converting an Evo site to Revo ?

MODX used to be a talked about CMS, but that seems to have fallen away

Question 3: Is it worth staying with MODX ?

There seems to be a lot of activity when it comes to the MODX Cloud

Question 4: Has the Cloud taken the time and resources that could have made MODX 3 a 2015 release ?

My personal thoughts / needs:

I have seen a huge increase of visitors over the years to a couple of my sites and the growth of the sites has become a major aspect that has to be taken into consideration.

Looking at the future of MODX, in particular the software:

• will things like automated updates be incorporated into the system
• will the system be able to cope with multiple thousands of posts / pages etc. (from an end user point - not from a developer point)
  
  What I am trying to say here is - an end user who has no tech knowledge creates pages and posts by simply clicking the button "New Resource" and adds their content, saves and then that's it - done, page or post created, next page.

I hope that I haven't offended anyone in any form - the post is here to find out what others think and what their plans are for their MODX future.

Revo is moving towards version 3, which will among other things involve using Composer for dependency management. Using Semantic Versioning, this means that there will be breaking changes from version 2. However, 2.5 and maybe even 2.6 (non-breaking feature changes) as well as a number of minor bug fixes and patches will be released as well.

The basic functionality won't change, just improvements in management of upgrades and dependencies, simplification of customizing Manager pages, things like that.

Thanks for the reply Susan

After writing this post I spoke to a few friends and agencies that I have worked with in my years and who I know use MODX, be it Evo or Revo or both.

The majority have come to pretty much the same conclusion as I have and are starting to convert older sites into other systems. Some of them are already building new sites with other software, rather than using MODX due to the lack of faith in the product.

Another reason for their line of thought has been the drop in forum and community activity. I agree with the activity in the Forum - there is only a small handful of people who are (always) answering questions, including yourself Susan.

Some years back the forum was filled with people asking and answering questions all the time - not only about the software in use.

A lot of this is in my opinion due to the LLCs lack of transparency - saying things will happen and then they don't.

I was hoping someone from the LLC would post something in reply to this, but as of yet - nothing. As I have also seen in the past with other forum posts from myself and others.

I don't want to make the wrong decision and a year down the road have to convert everything again to a new system.

I don't give up to easily, so will wait out a short while longer until I make my decision to move along or not. [ed. note: iusemodx last edited this post 8 years, 5 months ago.]

You might be better aware of what is going on if you get on the Slack channel. There is so much activity there that I often have to shut it off when I'm working on something to avoid the distraction. https://modx.org/

As far as the longevity of any software system, I am reminded of a situation I ran into 15 years ago as a computer repair technician. My employer had just hired a new tech when we got in an old PC from a small accounting firm for repair. I told the new tech to make sure to not touch the ancient 5-1/4" floppy disk in one of the drives. Of course, he had to pop it out to see what it was, and then when he tried to put it back it wouldn't run. The disk was the master disk for the old accounting software package the firm was using, and had never been removed from the drive. The current version of that software cost thousands of dollars, and was no longer compatible with the old data formats.

The point is, Evo is something like 10 years old now, and still works well, with a small community for maintenance and support. Revo is going strong with a growing active community (much has moved from the forums to Slack) after 5 or 6 years. Yes, there are updates, some breaking. And there is a new version hovering just under the horizon. What software package doesn't do the same? As technology advances, any system, be it hardware or software - but especially WWW technology - that doesn't constantly develop to keep pace will die. Consider a couple of not-so-minor examples. A Web application that doesn't keep up with the legal requirements for accessibility? Or an ecommerce application that doesn't keep up with changing tax laws?

I don't have a complete answer for you, but I can answer a few of your questions and make some comments.

The Forums are still pretty busy, though I think other sources are now providing a lot of the solutions to problems that people used to have come to the Forums to deal with.

As with any project, if you look at public forums, it will appear that there are lots of problems because people don't usually post if there's nothing wrong. There are zillions of MODX sites out there, so it would be surprising of there weren't a substantial number having problems from time to time.

I think MODX cloud (and the related internal issues) did siphon off a lot of time and resources (pun intended), but I think that's pretty much over now.

About upgrades -- MODX now has the UpgradeMODX extra which allows you to upgrade MODX Revolution from within the Manager (a la WordPress). It takes a few more steps, but it's more flexible and I've found the current version to be very reliable.

About upgrading from Evo to Revo -- I'm not unbiased on this one due to my authorship of the GoRevo commercial extra which helps automate the conversion. That said, I've converted all my sites to Revo and I would never go back to Evolution. Its underlying architecture is quite dated (hence the problems fixing PHP upgrade issues) and very difficult to maintain.

Because Revo is built on xPDO, things that are very difficult to do in Evo, are a breeze in Revo. This has resulted in many new and powerful extras that will never be available in Evolution. Here's a list of just the ones I've created: http://bobsguides.com/guide-to-packages.html. They would have taken several times as much work to create in Evo, if they were even possible there, and they would take quite a bit of effort to install. Virtually all of them install with a few clicks in Revolution.

Revolution also scales much better for larger sites and has a Manager that allows you to be *much* more productive.

At this point, the only advantage I see for Evolution is a snappier Manager, and for me, that's more than offset by the productivity tools in the Revo Manager (e.g., the ability to edit multiple resources and elements at the same time in popup windows). The Revo Manager continues to get faster, and I expect to see a major speed improvement in MODX 3 (or MODX Next as it's sometimes called).

This post by Jason Coward speaks to some of your questions. So does this commentary by SepiaRiver. And here's Mark Hamstra's take on MODX 3.

There is also a version of MODX 3 at GitHub and you can see that development is ongoing.

@BobRay - MODX 3 is NOT "MODX Next". MODX 3 is simply an update to Revo that has one small breaking change.

According to SemVer (Semantic Versioning) any change that breaks backwards compatibility must have a new major version number. Feature changes that do not break backwards compatibility have a minor number (as in 2.4.x) while bug fixes and patches have a third minor number (as in 2.4.1, 2.4.2, etc.). Version 2.5.0 will probably be released before version 3.

MODX Next is a vague designation for a totally different code base (again), probably based on the Slim framework for such things as routing, and using the Twig templating engine. The core will also be further modularized and re-organized to fit into the Micro Services pattern. The actual creating, presenting and maintaining of content - the unique CMS functions of MODX - won't change all that much, if any.

@iusemodx

It's true the forums aren't as busy as they used to be, but if you join the community Slack channel, you'll see where all the community is—it's alive and well. The forums will always be an important part of the MODX Community, but I speculate as other channels open up, people's attention will become diluted.

As for scalability of the Revo platform, it scales much, much better than the majority of competing applications, including "Enterprise" and commercial platforms.

Several of the sites I've deployed as part of the MODX Services team, are in Alexa's top 100k, which puts them in the 99.99th percentile of the most heavily trafficked sites on the Internet. These sites have tens of thousands of Resources, millions of visitors per month, peak loads that would make other CMSs crumble and their servers simply melt down—but MODX Revolution stands the charge.

Actually a lot lot of what we've been doing at the LLC has learning how to scale MODX, and Jason Coward has some fairly cutting edge ideas on where he wants to take MODX Next. Meanwhile, John Peca, and a group of incredibly talented, capable, and dedicated developers are working on the iterative improvements that you see in the github repo for Revolution.

There's a lot going on for MODX, @iusemodx — maybe we can get on the phone and chat about it? You can email me yj (at) MODX dot com or ping me in Slack "sepiariver". Would love to discuss your perspective on things

Thanks for the answers.

@Susan: I am aware that software needs to be updated and that Evo has come to its end and that a change has to be made.

The differences between Evo & Revo or that Revo possibly has many more benefits than Evo are not the discussion here. All I wanted to know is what is the future of the MODX software.

Will the future software be able to compete in its funtionality with the top 5, will it have the update functionality etc.

The question at the end of the day is basic: what is happening with the future MODX software

@Sepi River: thanks for the feedback

I very much recognise where you are coming from and have shared your views on the lack of activity on the forums and the issues with migrating to Revo (we have done about 5 Revo sites now, and still have 100 or so on Evo)

I think that Revo did miss a trick by being pretty hard to adapt. The manager was famously slow, it was prone to blank white pages both on the manager and sometimes the front end. The package manager was a great idea but the implementation from the authors point of view seems over complicated and difficult so I think many potentially good contributions just didn't happen and people, especially non developers, feel unable to contribute any more. There also seems to be an increasing number of abandoned extras.

However, all I can add is that after the Modxpo last week in Munich and hearing Ryan speak, I think I am more convinced that there is a future and that in the next 12 months we should see the start of a new chapter with, hopefully, an easier to adapt manager. I miss the ability to tinker and adapt plug ins and the manager as easily as I used to in Evo. There is certainly a lot of developer activity and there is more commercialism in some of the extras, which might be a good thing depending on your point of view.

We have had a look around at possible alternatives, but at the moment we holding the faith and have our fingers crossed for what the new year may bring.