DEVTRENCH.COM

MODx Sucks

So I was looking at my Google Webmaster Tools this morning for devtrench.com and I throught it was pretty funny to see that this site ranks #1 for "modx sucks".

Just for clarity I wanted to write this post to let everyone know that my opinion is that MODx doesn't suck, but that there are few sucky aspects of MODx. In fact, I would say that MODx is the best CMS out there when you consider how easy it is for regular people (non-geeks) to use. If you've never used MODx and are slowly killing yourself by using Joomla or some other piece of crap then I urge you to try it. I've quit looking for a CMS, because MODx does everything I need for client websites.

Since writing my MODx sucks post, I've worked a lot more with it and have concluded that one thing that could make MODx not suck as much is better documentation. Under the hood of MODx there is a database api and a document parser API whose usage is not documented very well, not documented at all, or out of date. I think most users of MODx would agree that MODx needs better, more up to date documentation, especially now with the new Revolution version coming out. Seems that the developers have always written documentation as an afterthought when it really needs to be at the forefront.

I really think that bad documentation is the reason that I didn't see MODx as a better framework when I wrote the old MODx Sucks post. I still don't think it's totally a framework like symfony, but it's much better than what I thought before. I realized this after diving into the code more and figuring out things on my own. Open up the documentParser class and have a look at all of the undocumented functions.

Honestly though, this problem plagues most open source software and programming in general. It's just difficult and extremely time consuming to write good documentation. I know I hate to do it. So perhaps a solution for MODx would be to make a call for better documentation from the community and see what happens. Oh wait...they ask us to get involved on both wikis. Hmmm.