I want to share a long-overdue update on the state of things at MODX. Hopefully you'll come away with an understanding of our recent journey, and of the road ahead. While this post was intended to be shorter, I do ask you take a few minutes to read it through.
The Business of MODX
At MODxpo 2010 in Dallas, I ended our inaugural conference with an impassioned promise—we were going to take MODX from a tool we created, used and shared with the world to a full-time profession.
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p> Living up to that pledge meant we had to attend to business not typically associated with an open source project. Some things we did well, others we missed the mark. But the end result of that journey is expanding from four open source devotees into a team of over a dozen people.
Probably the biggest change at MODX was in bringing in a proven business pro to help guide our journey and to help us avoid pitfalls. Last year I recruited my boss, John Corcoran. He’s a seasoned CEO who's led teams for over 30 years, and under his mentorship we’ve radically transformed over the last 6 months. We now have an amazing foundation in place, a clear strategic direction, measurable metrics and an incredible future ahead of all of us (and I include the entire community in “us”!).
I want to be ultra-clear about the reasons behind these decisions. We really are absolutely dedicated to being a sustainable open source project with vendor-direct support, and becoming one of the top players in content management software. To that point, we are in the process of completing the last tranche of a $2M raise from a private investor group. They're incredibly supportive of MODX and they want to see us all win, too.
A huge personal change (for the better!) for me in all of this is that my role becomes being the full-time lead evangelist and curator of all good things that MODX should do—the Leader of Awesomeness, if you will. I'll work every day to make sure we stay true to our roots, and that we accelerate innovation, awareness and adoption.
The Time to Act Is Now
Whether it went publicly acknowledged or not, we’ve been listening for months to what’s going on in the community. In summary, we identified a few themes:
- We need to actively re-engage the community, listening and communicating.
- Evo has some great attributes, and it has been neglected.
- Revo also has some great things, but other pieces need work.
- For those that want to try Revo, there’s no straightforward migration path from Evo.
There are more things that could be added to the above list, but these are the ones we’re committing to tackle first. You will hopefully start noticing a higher level of interaction from the MODX staff. You should see improvements being made in the forum to make it easier for everyone to help others—including the MODX staff who now have revised job responsibilities that include spending more time actively helping others in the Community.
Back to Our Roots
You should also notice a friendlier tone from everyone—it’s easy to get swept up in urgent work matters and we apologize if we’ve ruffled feathers. We recognize things have been different from the earlier days as a fledgling project. Over the last year or so, some things received less attention than they deserved while we figured out how to transform MODX into a sustainable business. But now that is done and we’re focused on execution; it’s time to return to what got us here in the first place: amazing software backed by an even more amazing community. In short, we need to live up to our Vision and provide an amazing experience for everyone that touches our software. (More on our vision and tagline in a future post.)
Next Steps
This blog is going to be the hub for announcements and a primary communication channel going forward—the forums will still remain a huge part where discussions occur, but we want as broad an audience that may not live every day on the forums to miss topics. We hope you’ll start to read the MODX Blog regularly (subscribe to the feed) and that you’ll engage in any discussions that come up. In the interim, if you see anything that doesn’t seem right, or just want to share something privately, I welcome your feedback. You can email me directly at my first name at modx.com.
Let’s dive into the forums to discuss the state of MODX software and make it even more amazing, together. :)