The future of MODX: ideas, roadmap and release cycle?

[pbowyer]

Hi everyone,

It’s been 6 months since this thread was started, has there been any progress on any of the items?

I would appreciate honesty about if the project is going anywhere rather than more “it’s coming” and then we go through the same multi-year cycle. Projects can have a beginning and an end and it’s okay. This would stop hopes being dashed continually and allow for clarity and forward-planning.

@rthrash

We spend 6-figures a year on salaries across a handful of people (Jason, Mat, John, Jay, Me and others) that go directly to Open Source Software (Revo + Extras) virtually every week.

Across a year, how many FTE does this equate to working on MODX? It’s helpful to know to set expectations on how fast or slow development is likely to be. At present it feels like 0.2FTE (1 person, 1 day a week), which just about keeps the project ticking along.

@rthrash

We’re working on some guiding principles that will help make PRs less effort to review for future ones that come in.

Have these been published?

@rthrash

Community willing to help test but needs better documentation for non-developers

I agree, but it also needs to see that testing will get somewhere e.g. result in a merged PR. If we test and nothing happens for months… it doesn’t encourage testing.

@bobray

Another challenge is that MODX is now competing with use-case-specific commercial platforms.

This is true. Plus MODX is competing with other CMS’s that have seen active development over the past 7 years.

@halftrainedharry

This sounds mightily passive. Like a process you have absolutely no control over (like waiting for the sun to re-emerge during a rainstorm.) Aren’t you in a position (with the LLC and the direct contact/relationship to the core developers), where you can initiate/influence such a process?

I second this. All the way through the last 15 years it’s been the LLC that needs to come up with the roadmap because you control the repository and gate-keep the contributions. Having a roadmap helps to align contributions and gives a firm foundation from which to close PRs.

When the community did it through the MAB process… it went nowhere.

@opengeek

TL;DR: I was literally sitting down after the 3.2 release to update the original vision from MAB considering ten years of advancements in many areas of web development and to begin laying the foundation for presenting those revised goals to the community. It appeared as if we could finally start to move forward. Then this PR dump arrived…

The PRs could have been ignored, until the vision/roadmap was completed?

@opengeek

Towards the end of last year, the overwhelming silence from longstanding contributors and community members made it clear something had to change, so I set the goal of getting the 3.2 release out of the door then changing my attention to focus solely on reviewing and revising the ten-year-old goals we set forth in the MAB so we could get the architectural foundation of the product cleaned up, leaving the technical debt and unwanted artifacts of the legacy code behind.

I appreciate that on both fronts, having a 3.2 release has shown the project to be alive to clients (who after all pay for time I contribute back to MODX) and helped not lose more of them to other CMS’s.

@opengeek

And at first, I was livid, as once again my plans to refocus appeared to be foiled.

It sounds like the tsunami of 79 PRs hurt you. What was the reason they could not be closed as “not in line with the vision” or “let’s get this roadmap sorted before we go there”? There was a choice to be made here, and it sounds like you feel the PRs have to be engaged with?

On the topic of PRs/Issues/Discussions which was discussed in Thinking through contribution processes and seeking input, where has this landed? Do we have a workable process which is now bringing order back to the repository and development?

@jenswittmann

Perhaps we could also reactivate the MODX Bug Hunt, focusing on the next releases, as a community meet-up every quarter or so.

It worked well to triage bugs, even though the prize was never paid out.

@jenswittmann

1. Who can currently edit tags/milestones and can we open this up to other members?

Is a good question, because if the repository work can only be done by a tiny team, it’s more overwhelming.