Web CMS: MODx Revolution Targets Drupal, Joomla Markets

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Jul 22, 2010

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MODx Revolution 2.0 is available This past March we saw a hint of what was coming from the open source Web CMS project called MODx (news, site). Now their latest release, MODx Revolution v2.0, has officially arrived. This is the future of the MODx project. Let's take a peek.

Playing With the Big Boys

When you are sitting at the same table as the three most well known open source web content management systems — Drupal, Joomla and WordPress — you have to be playing your A game. That's what MODx Revolution 2.0 is, according to MODX CEO and co-founder Ryan Thrash:

"Revolution represents more than three years of work reinventing our classic code base," said Ryan. "We looked at what was available in both the Open Source and Commercial worlds and thought we could create something truly special and different. We did, and now we're sharing an amazing platform for consuming APIs, managing content and creating custom web applications with the world."

In the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share report, MODx was mentioned as one of the open source content management systems that was gathering strength, and it was also tied for Best Overall PHP CMS in the 2009 Packt Publishing Awards.

MODx Revolution 2.0

So in the court of public opinion, it appears that there's something good happening here. MODx Revolution 2.0 has been over three years in the making. It is a complete redesign from the ground up of its classic Web CMS, MODx Evolution. and brings with it a number of new features and improvements, including:

A new caching system that lets you cache any Element. You can also override the default caching and utilize Memcached, or another large-scale caching method.
Extend or override core features and/or integrate third party applications, while maintaining an upgrade path.
Create Contexts that allow you to design different views of your site, have multi-sites (such as different languages) or sub-domains.
Core Logging for debugging and error tracking.
A new MODx Manager for managing sites can be customized for site managers and editors.
A user management and security system for fine-grained permissions and access control.
Support for add-ons using Transport Packages that can be easily deployed using a Package Manager.

The Edit Screen captures are what a site editor might see (although without any customization of fields etc.).

Due to the significant difference between the current and previous generations of MODx, you are going to have to wait a bit for third party add-ons and extensions to show up, but some are apparently already in the works.

The Package Retriever is the interface that allows site developers and administrators to browse, retrieve and install new MODx addons from within the manager similar to adding addons to Firefox. This same mechanism may be used by developers to deploy reusable packages they built to speed up delivery of common toolsets.

Why Choose MODx?

We asked MODx's Director, Channel and Community, Jay Gilmore who MODx is built for. He indicated that there are a variety of different websites built on MODx, but that the common theme was that each one had a very different "look". According to Ryan: