It is time to set the record straight—specifically, to reconstruct the complete history of how the MODX community formed, what it was made of, and how it slowly died. I will tell this from my own perspective and from my own bell tower, since I played no small part in it, and some people even blame me directly for the collapse itself. Nevertheless, this history is quite voluminous and interesting, yet it has never been gathered in one place. Moreover, if you ask ChatGPT about this, it has absolutely no clue what happened, how it was, where it came from, or where it went. But thanks to the website https://web.archive.org/, I managed to unearth a lot of things from the past, despite the original websites no longer existing. Almost all links in this article will point to it. This site might not open from Russia, so a VPN may be required. Also keep in mind that pages from it often load very slowly, so you will need to be patient.

First, a little about me. Nikolay Lanets, also known as Fi1osof. I entered IT back in July 2007, long before it became mainstream. My first 3 months were spent at an internet service provider company in Khabarovsk. But then the CTO moved to a cellular company, SkyLink, and invited me over to their billing department. There, I had to urgently master Oracle, and for almost a year I wrote a lot of SQL queries. I consider this my most important experience because databases are the foundation for everything, while everything else is just interaction interfaces.

By the way, ChatGPT hardly knows me either, and attributes some of my developments to other people. And it speaks with such confidence! By the way, this is a major danger—when a very popular information source has the ability to speak absolute untruths with confidence and bear no responsibility for it. Well, all people can do is level up their fact-checking skills.

In 2008, I quit my job to enter the TOGU Technical Institute. A couple of months later, I realized I had nothing to do there, as the technical instructors lacked a real technical base and I had nothing special to learn from them. And when in November I was given a failing grade on principle because I hadn't turned in my work on time, I said goodbye to the institute and flew to Moscow in December, right in the middle of the 2008 crisis. There, I settled in a hostel almost in the very center of the city on Chekhovskaya and went freelance. And somewhere from January 2009, I started working with MODX.

It should be noted that back then they were still called MODx (i.e., with a lowercase x), and later they made all the letters uppercase as MODX. Here and henceforth, I will write MODX for the sake of unification.

Generally speaking, back then Evolution didn't even exist yet. As I recall, the latest version before that was MODX 0.9.6.3, and only later was named MODX Evolution released, followed much later by MODX Revolution. And Revo didn't take off immediately. First, up to version 2.2 it had a lot of bugs, and I didn't see any possibility of running commercial projects on it at all. Second, the community resisted its introduction very fiercely, not wanting to switch from the lighter and more understandable Evo to the heavier and more complex Revo. Nevertheless, with the release of Revo 2.2, it became much more stable and I started building my first projects on it, both personal and commercial. I liked Revo because it had a richer API, better separation of logic from templating, a system for extending models and tables, and many other things that provided great room for creativity. But this very thing later became one of the main reasons for the rapid collapse of the newly united community, and that is what I will now try to explain.

Interestingly, by 2012 the MODX community was already in decline. modx.pro and modx.im appeared only later (and I will talk about this below), and at that time there were two main communities: modx.ru and community.modx-cms.ru. Both of them were already recording a decline in user activity at that time, but still continued to hang out on the internet. And then chance played its hand. In 2012, I made a small hybrid of two systems—modLivestreet. This was a combination of MODX Revolution + LiveStreet. LiveStreet is a sort of Habr-style blog engine on a minimal budget, quite popular at the time.

By the way, its code is still on SourceForge

right here

.

According to the plan, LiveStreet inside MODX was supposed to cover the blogging and commenting functionality, because in LiveStreet that was originally the core and quite well-developed mechanism, whereas MODX had almost none of this, and the few attempts to implement such things using MODX's own means were unsuccessful.

Anyway, I published a few notes about modLivestreet on Habr. Here is one of them, and it even has a YouTube video: https://habr.com/ru/articles/157135/

And after a while, Alexey, the creator of the community.modx-cms.ru community, knocked on my PMs and offered to update his community to my engine and develop it together. As it turned out, at that time his site was running on pure LiveStreet, which was neither presentable for the MODX community (like shoemakers without shoes) nor customizable (MODX was loved precisely for the ability to do your own thing, while LiveStreet, although it had the necessary functionality out of the box, was very difficult to customize). Well, that's when I got into the big MODX community. On November 5, 2012, Maxim published the article A New Page in the History of the Russian-speaking MODX Community. And the community received this news with joy back then.

But, as the saying goes, they started with a prayer and ended with a dirge. As early as November 26, 2012, Dmi3y published the article Give Revolution to the Revolutionaries! A new community on MODX (MODX.im), where he announced that I am a jerk and broke everything and therefore they are leaving for their new community. Just in case, I will quote this epic in full.

It all started a month ago, and nobody expected it to end like this

Fi1osof

came to the community with good intentions. He updated the design, linked LS with MODX REVO, but that's where all his good deeds ended :( As his next step was the beginning of the end for this community in its current form:

community.modx-cms.ru/blog/8949.html

meaning that what we had strived for so long—to stop the EVO-REVO holy wars— he brought back + took it all to a personal level.

Well, and the finale can be tracked here:

community.modx-cms.ru/blog/us/9153.html

meaning deleting a universally respected person is a normal action on his part! Especially since, as it turned out, Agel Nash wasn't involved at all in the problems with Filosof's sites!

community.modx-cms.ru/blog/us/9153.html#comment58904

Bottom line: considering that all rights and accesses belong to

Fi1osof

and attempts to fix the situation with the help of

Carw

did not yield results, it was decided to

create an alternative resource

MODX.im

where I invite everyone

Our first steps: — working search — separation into EVO REVO categories — abolished ratings to remove the temptation to game them — recruiting a team of moderators — the main page is now in Habr style (meaning you decide for yourselves what will be displayed there)

Down with injustice and holy wars!

The protest action against the actions of

Fi1osof

was supported by:

Agel Nash

bezumkin

99% changed his mind about making modx-revo.ru Valentin returned, but already in MODX.im

SurRealistik

vanchelo

alooze

Akool

bumkaka

Extremum

Elena

ShCoder

Grinyaha

and others

sign up in the comments if you agree

In turn, Vasily Naumkin (aka bezumkin) launched a separate community modx.pro, because at the very least he had long switched to Revo, and most likely there were personal motives too, although that's beside the point.

In other words, less than two months passed before the community allegedly fell apart again. And many blamed me specifically for this, saying that I took advantage of my administrator rights and deprived individual users of their content. But the fact that they had previously hacked my personal site and ruined it along with several other sites of mine on that server, and that on the community site itself they ruined many of my articles and comments by replacing the original links with a pointer to a 3-letter destination—for some reason they kept quiet about that. But I wouldn't have done anything to them if I didn't have hard proof. As it happened, just shortly before that, I had installed my new visit statistics collection addon on both my sites and the community site, which, among other things, saved the session cookie and visitor IP to the database. And in order to cover their tracks, they had to change both the IP address and the cookies, because if even one of these two metrics remained, other visits could be linked. For example, we see several cookies on one IP, then we collect all IPs with these cookies, then all cookies for all these IPs, and so on. And at some point, I clearly tracked down an authorized user—it was Agel Nash, the very person who always positioned himself specifically as a security specialist. And since MODX was leaky from the beginning and always had vulnerabilities, it wasn't hard for him to either log into my sites and break them, or get into the community site and mess up all my links. As far as I'm concerned, that was a very mean move. What did I do in response? I simply took and updated the creator attribute for all his topics and comments, meaning the articles and comments themselves weren't ruined (unlike what he did with my articles), they simply stopped belonging to him and became a full-fledged heritage of the Community.

Back then, the discussion of all this took place in this thread. By the way, I strongly advise re-reading the comments in that article. There are quite a few vivid moments where they blame mortal sins precisely on me, as if I was the one who started it all :-)

By the way, my position wasn't out of revenge, it was out of justice.

And below that you can find a more detailed description of the situation.

And as you can see, my comments are downvoted; I'm the bad guy for not keeping my mouth shut, for arguing with the old-timers, and for daring to respond with real actions to the sabotage on both my sites and the community site itself.

So what was the essence of all the arguments anyway? It was that I strongly disagreed with the fact that these old-timers were holding back the community's progress. That is, they all accused me of destroying the community, while trying everything they could to keep this community stuck on the legacy MODX Evo branch and actively sabotaging the promotion of the MODX Revo branch. Why? Because Revo required learning anew, whereas Evo allowed them to make money relatively easily using old, well-worn mechanics. But I stood for the principle: "If you're not helping promote Revo, at least don't get in the way." Practically all conflict situations followed this scenario:

1. A newbie arrives and asks, "How do I do X and Y on Revo?"

2. One of the old-timers shows up (most often that very Dmi3y) and starts with the sentiment, "Why do you need this Revo? Do it on Evo."

3. I step in and object, "What does Evo have to do with this? The question was about Revo. If you don't know how to help, walk past in silence."

I laid out my position in more detail in this topic. By the way, in the web archive, this topic is saved precisely with broken links pointing to the 3-letter site—that's the nasty trick Agel pulled. But this article reflects my view of the community's state so well that I will quote it here, even without the links.

Who lives well on modx-cms.ru?

Blog by Fi1osof

I'll start this topic with a short story about myself, who I am and what I'm doing here...

My name is Kolya, known online as Fi1osof. 30 years old, practical programmer without a degree, but coding a lot. For many here I was previously completely unknown, and now I've started being an eyesore... But sorry, position obliges. Otherwise I wouldn't be showing this much activity. To understand, I've been officially registered here since April 2010, but my first visits started back in January 2009. And on

http://tracker.modx.com

I am the 187th registrant. Yesterday we talked with Ryan, to whom Max introduced me, and when he found out I'd been registered there for so long, he was surprised why we hadn't talked before. It's very simple here: I prefer to figure everything out myself rather than go to forums and ask. So, despite many not knowing me here, I can tell you for sure: very few people in Runet know MODX the way I do. And this is important to understand, because as a person you might hate me, but ignoring my knowledge is a big stupidity, since I can teach a lot. And I'll put it this way: I don't do things halfway; if I took on modx-cms.ru, I will go all the way, so wearing me down with attrition, intrigue, etc. is pointless. And I will briefly state one of my goals—to raise the MODX community to a fundamentally new level. This means whether you want it or not, while I'm here, changes will keep appearing.

First of all, here is what I'm ready to change: popularize MODX Revolution. Let me say right away: whoever loves Evo so much—let them keep loving Evo, there's plenty of documentation on Evo here.

What do I mean: it amazes me that despite MODX Revolution 2.0 appearing more than two years ago, 60% are still stuck on Evo. Meanwhile, Revo 2.2.5 has long been released and MODX 3 is just around the corner. And what, do you all want to say that Evo is the limit of perfection and nothing else is needed? That Revo is from the Evil One and the MODX team develops it for nothing? Have you thought for a single minute that the MODX team knows MODX (including Evo) a thousand times better than you do, and if they do something, it's only for its development? How can you ignore progress? Damn, so much has been written for you, and you're all still sitting here asking questions like how to escape a string or how to output TV parameters. At the same time, they still manage to judge what is good and what is bad...

But I am amazed, yet not surprised, why the atmosphere here is like this. I know why everything is the way it is. It's very simple: simply because the #1 person in the community rating really loves MODX Evolution and supports it in every way, putting down MODX Revolution.

Yes, Dima, you are the ultimate evil for the community. Not because you're a bad person, but because you hold back the entire community. All beginner programmers need to learn from someone, and most often they come here for that. And here you are, eager to teach them, and of course to work with Evo! Why would they need Revo?

Heard a good example today:

I was asking our drivers here: "Why do you all drive Gazelles? Why don't you buy a Japanese car? You know Japanese cars break down much less often." And they reply: "We know. But if a Gazelle breaks down, I understand at least something in it and can fix it, whereas I don't understand anything in a Japanese car."

So Dima, it's time to switch to a Japanese car. And if you don't want to, at least don't get in the way of others, don't convince newbies that they need a Gazelle. Let them drive normally. You downvoted all my topics. Were they technically completely wrong? Which one of these didn't you like? I didn't notice you telling me that I wrote everything completely wrong there. But someone said they found something useful for themselves.

But I know why you're downvoting everything I post. Remember the first comment our dialogue started with. You started defending Evo. And how did it all end? It ended with you starting a war against the introduction of Revo. And what does such a policy lead to? To people like this leaving this place. A person who knew a lot, who drove progress, who led others into the future, has left. That's it, he won't teach a single newbie here anymore how to properly crank out sites on Revo... IMHO: one such person who masters new things and shares their knowledge is worth thousands of those who copy-paste this knowledge. And I would prefer to talk to a dozen such people than to ten thousand who haven't created anything new yet, but only rewrite someone else's stuff while proving what is good and what is bad.

So Dima, I'm not like that. I won't just bail from here. And let other "Dimas" understand this too. I repeat: you can continue writing all your stuff on Evo, but don't you dare slow down the development of Revo, because I will raise the issue of completely deleting comments of the category "No, Revo is bad, you'd better build on Evo."

I've said my piece.

Yes, that is the reason. My main crime was that I dared to speak out against those who were already comfortably settled in this community and simply raking in cash. They didn't need research and community growth; they needed a steady flow of simple orders and the absence of anything that could disrupt their assembly line. And then here I come with new technologies, actively training the community in them and pushing the transition from the Evo they are used to over to Revo. And as we know, if something is gained somewhere, something is lost elsewhere. And when they broke my sites, ruined my articles and comments, created their new communities, etc., they weren't thinking about the community; they were thinking about their markets, their incomes. Nothing personal, just business (c).

Well, what next? Where did all these communities go? Did they manage to create a bright future?

community.modx-cms.ru

Died quite quickly. And I offered Maxim to sell the modx-cms.ru domain to me; he refused and simply let it expire. Now this domain advertises someone's hosting.

modx.im

modx.im was originally built on LiveStreet, not MODX (classic "shoemakers without shoes" case). But then they supposedly remade it on Evo, but later they abandoned this domain and moved to community.evocms.ru.

Today, we can say the community is almost dead (just a few publications per month).

Moreover, its creator Dmi3y hasn't even written comments since 2022.

modx.ru

Despite the fact that in 2013 they performed some update to their website and wrote about it on Habr: https://habr.com/ru/articles/193328/, they never managed to bring it to a decent level. Currently, the site is completely dead, notes are not even published every month, and spam posts about casinos and such hang for months without being cleaned up.

111 spam posts from just a single account—that's impressive.

modx.pro

This is the most interesting patient. Out of all the communities that branched off back then, this was the liveliest and most active, developing for many years and still not dead. But Vasily Naumkin (its creator) stepped away from affairs a long time ago and hardly publishes anything even on his personal site bezumkin.ru, and if I understand correctly, he even removed the comment functionality itself because just recently they supposedly existed, but now they are gone.

There, I re-checked Yandex cache, my memory didn't fail me, there was a comment of his that he doesn't take orders.

By the way, to be fair, we buried our hatchets a long time ago and are generally on normal terms, and I even visited him twice when passing by. Vasily was quite hospitable. But currently, I view modx.pro in isolation from him, especially since he handed it over to other hands long ago.

So what's interesting about modx.pro? Well, we had friction there too, over the exact same wave. And you know, I only understood the nature of this friction this year. I only recently realized that, unlike me, they were always good marketers and salespeople. Unlike me, they always thought about how to milk money from the community. That newbies shouldn't be taught knowledge, not how to do everything themselves, but how to integrate their paid addons into clients' final websites. And I always missed this out of sight. I sincerely didn't understand why people didn't want to learn and master new technologies. Why promote a component that is initially a crutch and whose use initially limits capabilities, even if it simplifies entry-level understanding. A striking example of this is pdoTools, which was initially presented as a complete replacement for xPDO, while itself being built on top of xPDO. That is, this is pure marketing and deception to promote their products and services instead of teaching newbies proper programming methods. In this article, there is quite a heated holy war: https://habr.com/ru/articles/199062/, where Vasily also hypes up his pdoTools, although choosing more careful wording. But pay attention to the interesting attempts to simultaneously claim that xPDO is sluggish, and at the same time that pdoTools, created on top of xPDO, is faster than xPDO itself.

As is known, this system is entirely built on its own ORM called xPDO. It greatly simplifies work, allows writing a single universal code for different DBs, and much more.

Unfortunately, it cannot boast of output speed

(like, probably, any ORM in general), so I tried to combine its pros with regular PDO, add better work with chunks, and make a convenient library for MODX.

Main features:

Fast DB work.

All queries are composed in xPDO

, and fetched without objects—via PDO.

And here I will quote my comment, because although the communication is impolite, it deeply exposes the nature of my outrage.

And here is this baloney again... "My lovely addon"...

This isn't just your lovely addon. This is the greatest thing you've made—the greatest bluff! You still manage to fool simpletons into thinking you wrote an awesome component and are improving it a lot. And many believe it (don't have the brains to check). And the main thing—how much money have you already dragged out of SimpleDream for it? :-) After all, your working time is paid for.

Well, let's analyze what kind of unknown miracle this is that you've developed.

So, at first this was generally presented as an "alternative to xPDO". One of the links: it-folio.ru/forum/index.php?topic=663.0

WHAT?? was my reaction. What the heck without xPDO? Let's dig into the code: github.com/bezumkin/pdoTools/blob/master/core/components/pdotools/model/pdotools/pdofetch.class.php#L9

And what do we see there?

protected $query;

And there is quite a bit more xPDO throughout the component.

In general, this is no replacement for xPDO (good thing he stopped saying that long ago, realizing he blurted it out without thinking). This is simple syntactic sugar, and not just dubious syntactic sugar, but essentially standing on nothing. Let me explain.

Watch the hands, what we are offered: so everything works faster for you, install my miracle-tool, and everything will work super fast!

Is that so? Personally, I am in no way convinced by the fact that instead of simply executing $modx->newQuery(), I need to do:

The library is connected via modX::getService() like this:

// If we only need core functions

$pdo = $modx->getService('pdoTools');

// If we need DB work

$pdo = $modx->getService('pdoFetch');

At the same time, this is not 10 lines. This is 835 lines here: github.com/bezumkin/pdoTools/blob/master/core/components/pdotools/model/pdotools/pdotools.class.php

and 940 lines here: github.com/bezumkin/pdoTools/blob/master/core/components/pdotools/model/pdotools/pdofetch.class.php

But maybe it's worth it? Maybe there's something there that isn't in the core? Look at how many functions are executed right away: github.com/bezumkin/pdoTools/blob/master/core/components/pdotools/model/pdotools/pdofetch.class.php#L61

And this despite the fact that the entire xPDOQuery class in the core is 885 lines: github.com/modxcms/revolution/blob/develop/core/xpdo/om/xpdoquery.class.php

No, doesn't look like it. I can create a new query without this. $q = $modx->newQquery($className); Specify columns to fetch? No problem — $q->select(array('col1', 'col2', 'col3 as col 4'));

Join a table? Sure, $q->leftJoin() or $q->innerJoin(). However I please. Add conditions??? It was always there. $q->where($cond);

By the way, conditions in pdoTools only appeared very recently: bezumkin.ru/sections/components/1931/

Vasya, why don't you explain right away what you kept quiet about, what else is missing? There are still plenty of minuses, huh? Maybe you'll finally tell us that pdoTools doesn't check access rights, for example?

And now the main thing—why study all this when you can study the core? Why rewrite the whole system like this?

I know why. Because xPDO has a fatal flaw ( lurkmore.to/%D0%A4%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D0%BD%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%BA )—Vasya didn't write it.

And it also has 100500 changes in components, and don't forget to sync everything via git...

Well, maybe its performance is actually cool, huh? After all, he writes: >> How do you like outputting 2012 pages of a site in half a second?

Well, let's compare your creation with this small code:

$q = $modx->newQuery('modResource');
$q->select(array(
    "id",
    "uri",
    "pagetitle",
    "content",
));
$q->limit(2012);
$s = $q->prepare();
$s->execute();
$i = 1;
while($row = $s->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC)){
     $str = "$i";
     $str .= "{$row['pagetitle']}";
     print $str;
     $i++;
}

Also 2012 documents.

0.0165 sec. awesomescreenshot.com/0a01vmb228

At the same time it's 7 megabytes, not 18 like yours.

Or maybe you'll say I don't know how to program and am slandering you? Well, I'm ready to bet...

But your bosses at SimpleDream don't know how to program, which is why you manage to pull wool over their eyes. That's why they still pay you money for your "miracle developments" :-)

But that's not what's bad. What's bad is that you are leading beginner programmers down the wrong path. Instead of better studying the core and guiding them toward that, you shove your pdoTools at them. As a result, neither you nor they know the core itself. I can easily trash every single one of your addons. And what you were ranting about regarding contexts in your hybrid-whatever, I was just laughing. Only you didn't answer anything. And that's a pity...

And right at the very end, my main thought was designated:

But that's not what's bad. What's bad is that you are leading beginner programmers down the wrong path. Instead of better studying the core and guiding them toward that, you shove your pdoTools at them.

But maybe he isn't to blame for this, but the people themselves? The fact that by and large they don't want to learn, but want to take an easier path and fall right into a system where they get milked? I have no answer to this question.

So what's happening with modx.pro now?

In November 2020, Vasily announced that he is leaving MODX. And although I couldn't find an official announcement that Nikolay Savin was appointed as the main head there, nevertheless, he positions himself precisely as a co-owner and project manager. Here is proof:

Unfortunately, you won't be able to see the entire topic with comments because Nikolay deleted it.

Here https://modx.pro/components/25472 exists, and https://modx.pro/help/25474 exists, but https://modx.pro/development/25473 doesn't. That is, the topic itself wasn't illegal as such. And in the comments there, generally nobody was cursed out. But apparently, it wasn't enough that people dared to argue in the comments; they also dared to discuss some new technologies in the topic, rather than MODX bundled with paid components from ModStore.

Nevertheless, comments flew to email, so all is not lost and something can still be restored :-) For example, here is Nikolay's communication style:

Very strange, now the question "Who are you to speak for the entire MODX community?" is now an insult. But some other users have a different opinion:

And so it turns out, I was speaking to the point, and the output is blocking me and deleting the topic. And why? Because:

And you think it's only like that with me? No. Here is another example, one of many:

That is, while individual users discuss new technologies in their own separate topic, exchange experiences, and take interest in something, this king comes along and expresses his disgruntlement, "What is the point of this here?" How did the topic displease him? Didn't bring profit? Well, not everything brings profit. Pareto's principle hasn't been canceled. But these trifles are clearly uninteresting to him.

But let's take a closer look at the comments, what he wrote there and what changed. I will even quote what he said in the screenshot I attached just above:

Answering in order.

Who I am.

I am the co-owner and manager of this project. Ivan and I have been pulling the community and all the free software on which the Russian-speaking MODX ecosystem is built for many years. Among other things, we built and maintain a wonderful documentation project.

Who RSC are

Frankly speaking, this rudiment needs to be removed. This is a long-finished history. In peaceful times, when neighbors weren't shooting at each other, a company of smart guys gathered and agreed to develop all existing projects. An action plan was written, responsibilities distributed. We called ourselves RSC. This is not the current composition of the community, but a team on GitHub. It was the members of this team who owned the project. But due to the unstable political situation and other life circumstances, only @ibochkarev and I remain in the ranks.

By the way, right now active background work is underway on the redesign and new software guts of modx.pro.

Why I come into topics and dictate rules.

First of all, there are no strangers here...

Unfortunately, the comment cuts off further, only a part of it arrived in email, but this is enough. As you can see, Nikolay clearly writes "RSC no longer exists." It's a rudiment that needs to be removed. And how do you think, did he remove it? Of course not. That would be going a bit too far, removing information from the community site that it at least nominally belongs to the community. This information still hangs on https://modx.pro/about, along with a request for financial support.

And pay attention that the admins are listed there and Nikolay is not among them.

By the way, in his note about leaving, Vasily explicitly listed who remains in charge, and Nikolay is not listed there either.

Only in the comments below did he run in and claim some components for himself.

Nevertheless, this doesn't stop him from performing community moderator functions and calling himself the owner.

Another interesting fact: Vasily announced his departure in 2020, but Nikolay showed moderator traits long before that and on multiple occasions. You can easily find examples in old comments.

Some shadow play, don't you think? :-)

I think he became the de facto co-owner even before Vasily announced his departure, but chose to stay away from official statements, although these might just be my guesses and I could be wrong.

But there is another amusing moment :-) Right before that response from Nikolay where he claimed he's the boss here and there is no community, a more restrained response came from Ivan Bochkarev:

According to Ivan, RSC exists and hasn't fallen apart anywhere, and I am certainly a part of it given my significant contribution and all that.

Let me remind you that unlike Nikolay, Ivan was initially announced as the new administrator of modx.pro in Vasily's farewell topic and is still listed as such on the "About Us" page of the site itself. But in fact, as you can see, "The opinion of individual employees does not coincide with the administration's opinion." Such are the realities.

So what's the point of this whole wall of text here? Why so many words? So that history doesn't vanish without a trace. As I said at the beginning, gathering all the information today is impossible for someone who isn't in the know and doesn't even understand where to look for it. I ordered a deep research on the collapse of the MODX community from ChatGPT; it thought for half an hour, gathered various things, and then produced absolute nonsense. And I don't agree with that.

And one more thing. Back in the day, there was another community: MODX Club. The one I founded myself. But in 2019, I closed it. Vasily also wrote about this: https://modx.pro/news/18100

He refers to prisma-cms.com there, and that's not a mistake. Back then I indeed migrated modxclub.ru to that domain. But later the site moved to freecode.academy as a broader educational project, not limited to any single direction. And my actual article about closing MODX Club is here: https://freecode.academy/topics/vse,-net-bolshe-vashego-modx-kluba.html

And pay attention, I didn't hand the community over into someone else's hands, I didn't try to monetize it somehow. I simply announced its closure and that's it. I really didn't want someone to buy it and then run activities on my brainchild like "I'm the boss here! (c)".

So, if desired, this information can be pieced together bit by bit (although it's not easy, and I've been writing this article for 8 hours and haven't finished yet, though it's drawing to a close. It's just that I'm used to relying on facts and providing proofs, and finding them takes work). And it's very unpleasant that history is being erased and forgotten. For example, I remained in the TOP of that same modx.pro for many years, even though I didn't write anything there often. But at some point Nikolay came and said, "Screw those who spent their energy and earned a rating, now we'll recalculate it and kick them out." Literally: https://modx.pro/news/25024

And pay attention, when writing both the name and nickname, he didn't make links to my profile (while writing everyone else out with links). I thought, maybe it's because he blocked me and links to a blocked profile don't generate, but no, re-checked, everything is OK if you make it a link. Here is a link:

So that's nice, right? Listing everyone with links, but not a specific person. What an impartial administration :-)

Well, he demonstrated his attitude more than once:

He failed to grasp the kernel of usefulness... Every student extracts from a lesson exactly as much as they are capable of understanding (c).

And besides removing information about RSC, here is what he promised:

But I just went to his profile, looked at publications since February, and found nothing about AI. There is only stuff about MODX components, both paid and free.

And what about the community?

• In the Lessons section, there hasn't been a publication since October of last year.
• In the Job section, a few listings per year.
• Step-by-step instructions—nothing since January.
• For Developers—2 publications this year (and June is ending).
• New Addons and Their Versions. Oh yes! Almost every day :-) Paid addons don't sell themselves, after all.

So it turns out that almost all activity of the MODX community comes down to the operational activities of a single marketplace. This isn't education; this is marketing.

Well, since it's marketing, then as one of my first bosses said, "Economic crimes must be fought economically." And although there are no economic crimes here, since economics is at the head of everything, the methods will be purely economic.

And what kind of methods and what for? I think overall they can be characterized like this—the final devaluation of the MODX market.

It's time to say, "Leave the old man alone." Almost all MODX veterans have stepped away from affairs. Newbies don't master technologies and aren't capable of bringing anything new into it (they only engage in integrating ready-made paid components, and all at the expense of end clients). At the same time, the end clients are the ones who get completely screwed. All those who for some reason ordered websites on MODX, who paid both for the work and for paid components (just because the "programmers" themselves are not programmers at all and can't write anything themselves) and who received their MODX sites—now cannot simply update or migrate to new technologies if they want to (because you can't just remake a MODX site without knowledge, and trying to remake a site from scratch is a big risk of dropping in search rankings or breaking something). I won't give new MODX sites to these clients, but I will give them objective information on why they shouldn't build their sites on MODX. And for those who have already built them, I can help with a smooth update of their sites to new technologies without stopping the current site. Fortunately, I have all the necessary competencies for this, and back in February I purposefully quit Big Tech to focus more on my own directions. And right around then, I had the time to test this on one of my very old client's sites—https://happybaby2000.ru/

This is a very old site, made many years ago not by me, still on shopkeeper3. The client came to me back then with a request to customize it, and I implemented my shopModx on top of shopkeeper.

Here is what it looked like very recently: https://old.happybaby2000-ru.portfolio.fi1osof.ru/

And what's most interesting, under the hood it's still the exact same MODX :-) Here is the updated site right next to it: https://happybaby2000-ru.portfolio.fi1osof.ru/

That is, a headless-CMS approach is applied on the frontend here, which I wrote about on Habr back in 2019. And MODX runs on the backend. This eliminates the need to rewrite everything from scratch, while making the front-end part of the site using completely modern technologies with all the perks unavailable to MODX. And on the server, the new engine simply works directly with the database, or through MODX connectors where required.

At the same time, this takes very little time (a small site can be updated in a day or two), and a fairly large online store in a week, maximum two. So end clients now have alternatives, while how the community will adapt and develop will be interesting to watch.

P.S. By the way, I now conduct my professional activities very publicly. Now you can see what projects I'm involved with and what tasks I'm working on. For example, here are all the tasks regarding happybaby2000: https://fi1osof.ru/tasks?projectId=cmqafoz4p0007rv0uabh2bgih&status=Done