MODx and Beyond
A few years ago, back when I was just first starting out with the PHP language, I had a goal to find a good, solid application that would meet some of my needs for a personal site I wanted to deploy. You see, as an ex-ASP programmer I had alot of knowledge in some of the open-source ASP-based portal systems out there. I knew there had to be something similar for PHP...but which one? I was amazed at the number of options out there! So I went out hunting for the right solution to meet my needs...
It's pretty much safe to say that I've tried out just about every major portal system that's listed on the OpenSourceCMS site. Drupal, Geeklog, Mambo/Joomla, PHP-Nuke, Typo3, Xaraya, Xoops, SubDreamer, and others...I've tried them all! All of them had their perks...but they also had some minuses too. The biggest problem I had with alot of them was the lingo they used. I mean, what the hell is a Mambot? Plus, some of the API's weren't too easy to wrap my head around. Mix that with a complicated templating system and you've got a real fight on your hands. All I really wanted was a good CMS that would allow me to easily integrate my own site design with the functionality of a blog, link directory, a forum, and some other nifty ideas I had rolling around in my head. The problem just seemed to be that I was fighting too much with the way these CMS's were designed and not enough on the ideas I had.
Fast forward a few months later. I was sitting in at a meeting with a web design company that my employer was to use for their own website. In that meeting, Ryan shows up and demos Etomite for us. I was complete thrown back by it! It was pretty darn close to what I was looking for in an easy to use but open CMS. Something about it just appealed to me! And when I discovered a modification of Etomite called MODx...that was it...I was sold! It's funny...if it wasn't for that one meeting I probably would have never heard of Etomite or MODx and I would have never become part of the development team.
After MODx became an official fork of Etomite, alot has happened since then. MODx has changed in ways I never dreamed of when I first saw Etomite for the first time. My hope is that MODx will continue to grow and evolve and that more and more developers will learn about MODx and see just how flexible it really is. Here's to the future of MODx!
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Unlike you, I was not impressed with Etomite. Or more precisely, I liked many things about it but the community was not that energetic (at least, when I dropped by which was when 0.6 was out) and the vision certainly was lacking compared to MODx.
I am glad you forked, for you took what I liked about Etomite and pushed it well behind its Elder... not to mention, a community thriving with ideas and talent !
When I first contacted MODx using the available contact form, I received an email from Ryan explaining all the great features that will be available for MODx, and knowing that the core team behind is very-very friendly, I decided to give it a go, because I almost fade up building my own CMS system, starting from PHP era to ASP .Net era.
After trying it for a while, I'm amaze with the easy to use templating system and easy front-end editing option that MODx have, but realizing the limited capability of having a multi site system thrown me off a little, I figure out that the current project is not mature enough to be used extensively to build community site on top of this framework. I'm kinda disappointed at that time, and later decided to give it a go and embed all the necessary integration to make this CMS becoming more powerful.
The more I'm developing a new site, script, and hack for MODx, the more I realize that my tiny decission, to give MODx a chance to be used on all my crazy ideas, is really the most important decision that I ever made during my experience in web development. The lite core system that MODx has does affect the usability for most developers like me that are looking for a pre-mature system that can be modified into a mature system according to what we want, and it can be used effectively by the end-users, without having to learn all the unnecessary logic behind the system.
I know this is a long comment, but I just want to share my personal experience with MODx that is trully amazing, and I always wish that I found this great CMS since a few years back then, so I don't have to deal with learning a new language called .Net and creating all the un-updated website that I build from scratch, because of the lack in resources, and knowledge maybe ;).
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