Nevertheless, I also believe you can build a scalable and highly performant CMS using the file system to store content. In fact, I architected and led the development of a successful "enterprise CMS" (targeted at small to medium sized financial institutions) using flat files for regular content and templates. It runs on a server farm supporting over 100 sites/server and millions of hits/day. We did use a database to store user info and some odds and ends where it seemed to make sense but 90% of the content was being pulled out of plain old files.

We decided to use the file system because we believed it would make it a whole lot easier to support versioning, grouped changes, and multi-stage deployment, features that aren’t part of MODx and which are probably not important to MODx’s core audience (but are important to a certain class of CMS user). In fact, these sorts of features are antithetical to MODx’s basic premise of simple content authoring and publishing. I’m still not sure you need to user a relational database to store snippets, chunks, etc. but that won’t stop me from continuing to use and like this great application.

Damn straight I’m entitled to an opinion after all these decades.

For me it’s just a retro fad sponsored by MySQL, Inc. and over-hyped by crowd behavior. There are better ways to organize CMS content, I just want a system that lets me do things my way. MODx ain’t it. So thanks for the chitchat, that much is worth knowing.

My opinion: 90% of all current blogs, web sites that use MySQL shouldn’t be using it. Slowdown is noticeable vs. flat file CMS sites. See web-app.net for contrast (and I hate Perl). Firefox’s SQLite is dog slow even from ramdisk. Things were better before. I’m a sysadmin, I know what I’m doing with tuneup.

You find most CMS web sites won’t eat their own dogfood; they use wikis.

To me that says something. We also have Google; need for SQL queries is much reduced, even for the large content sites. Just use Google.

Where SQL belongs is exactly where the links above say it belongs - millions of small data items updated frequently in private databases. The only form of CMS content near that requirement is a forum.

To each his own. I consider SQL archaic mainframe tech dressed as modern hotness.

Google doesn’t use SQL, but MapReduce. Good for them, but they want to pawn another buzzword, ’cloud computing’ - or, client/server. Supposedly, the PC rescued us from that. It’s all rehash from prehistory. Just depends what you’re trying to sell.

I personally don’t want Yet Another Language when I have already HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP.

I can live without SQL and DB abstraction layers just to pull text snippets from disk. Thanks anyway, boys.