Reflecting on 2012

2012 was an amazing year for MODX. It will probably go down as the biggest inflection point in our history in fact. Many activities took place that may not have been readily apparent to the broader Community, so I thought I’d take a moment to highlight a few key things.

By Ryan Thrash  |  November 28, 2012  |  3 min read
Reflecting on 2012

2012 was an amazing year for MODX. It will probably go down as the biggest inflection point in our history in fact. Many activities took place that may not have been readily apparent to the broader Community, so I thought I’d take a moment to highlight a few key things.

MODXpo 2012 attendees
Some of the MODXpo 2012 attendees. Photo credit Karl Eberius

SoftLayer Catalyst

We began the year as one of the first participants in the SoftLayer Catalyst program. Having access to their leadership for advice and strategy, along with free infrastructure, was invaluable. We consider them both great mentors and friends in addition to being business partners.

SoftLayer has been instrumental in helping us craft a business model that works for the world we live in today, where bits and bytes are increasingly more strategic than bricks and sticks.

CMS Expo

May 8-10 was the first time we stepped into the public eye amongst peers and competing platforms, after much prodding from John Coonen. It was a blast, and the results were well worth it. We certainly confirmed it is time to stop flying under the radar.

We also reaffirmed that if you really care about having complete, straightforward control over how your web projects look and behave—without being forced to dive into code—then no better solution than MODX exists.

Expect to see even more of MODX publicly, in a lot more places, in 2013 and beyond.

Growing the Business

We have a killer team. Our August innovation meeting in Dallas, where everyone came to town from all over the world, was truly transformational for our staff.

Figuring out how to maintain our strong Open Source heritage while supporting a growing team isn’t easy. But we’re absolutely dedicated to Open Source and investing a ton in providing the ultimate platform on which to build and manage web projects. This will be possible as a result of the groundwork we put in place in 2012. We’re always looking for great people to join us on our mission of unleashing creativity on the web. Contact me privately if interested. ;)

MODX Cloud

Managing, maintaining and supporting a popular Open Source platform takes so much more time and money than you could probably ever imagine. MODX Cloud is how we’ll continue funding that, and we have some awesome plans for it (more on that in future updates). But the short version is that it was conceived as a platform to make the work you do as a web designer or developer easier and more productive than you ever thought possible.

We started the year with a prototype of MODX Cloud, demoed it at CMS Expo, and will finish the year having shipped multiple releases, paying customers, and data centers in multiple countries.

MODX Cloud is already an amazing, time saving tool, and it will only continue to get even better. An as mentioned already, it is also the tool we’ll use to fund ongoing innovation in our software. As such, we invite you to help support MODX’s future by taking a serious look at MODX Cloud.

MODXpo 2012

It was awesome and humbling having nearly 200 people from as far away as India and Portland in Utrecht, NL, on November 10. Meeting many folks I’ve only digitally known for years was especially a treat. Launching the new Forum design live during the opening keynote thanks to Mark’s, Dustin’s and Mike’s hard work was also a blast—it didn’t break so Mark got off easy ;).

MODXpo reinforced that we need to foster much more face-to-face connections for the Community, to help fill the demand for learning and collaborating on MODX, and to help spread the overall MODX awareness and adoption around the globe. We can pick up a lot of pointers from other communities like Drupal, Joomla and WordPress on this front … and we will!

Looking Forward

We’re equally as excited about what comes next … and that’s exactly what I’ll talk about later this week.