October CMS as you know it is dead
wintercms.com
wintercms.com
Good for Winter CMS for continuing development of the OSS version.
This is an example of the system working.
[0] As in "developers using the CMS"; for actual users of projects based on the CMS, absolutely nothing changes.
Calling this a hostile takeover is being extremely overdramatic. There was a fork.
That being said, it is the right of the maintainers to fork the software as allowed by the Open Source license the original code was under. Users now have the choice of paying the original company or using the free version with a new name. I fail to see how this is user-hostile.
Another case in point: CentOS and its new forks that are emerging.
This is a blog post written from one side (and a side I'm generally more sympathetic to) but no doubt when it is a major break between two factions, especially "founders" versus "maintainers" there are obviously two sides to the story, and the great thing is that one side doesn't always have to "win"
The new pricing model for October CMS is cheap, but no longer open source:
- $9 per project
- $150 for unlimited projects
For comparison, Craft CMS, a popular commercial CMS also written in PHP, charge $299 for a licence for a single project.
[1] https://octobercms.com/blog/post/october-cms-moves-become-pa...
It’s more agency projects that have that cost; additionally, Craft receives fees from paid plugins that have their own separate support infrastructure.
I personally use Craft for my website and chose it over OctoberCMS, though I had given October a close look when I made the transition two and a half years ago.
I’ve been on the delivery end of numerous contracts like this over the years. The early big red flag is when you as an organisation are asked to send multiple developers on £xk per day training courses out of your own pocket so they can become “certified”, with the promises of lucrative long term contracts. Ultimately this always ends badly in my experience.
That said, just to make sure you're aware, some companies pay hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars (I don't know first hand about millions, but I know hundreds of thousands is easy and I'd easily guess million+ isn't unheard of) annually just in licensing for "enterprise" CMS.
For example, I don't want to be IT support for my company's WordPress installation.
I am willing to pay $100 per month so that I can tell the VP of Marketing "Please go talk to the nice people at <Wordpress Provider> about why the two buttons in that theme don't align to the same right margin. Tell them to send me an email if something needs analyzed on our side. KTHXBYE."
I also don't want to have to navigate the blizzard of AWS required in order to implement something that won't fall over when 3 canaries and pigeon decide to bang on it--let alone if HN features it.
I imagine that the CMS space is quite similar.
It’s got a beautifully simple API and templating system that really lets you tackle and manage projects how you want to tackle them.
We’ve had production sites with thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of daily hits running off it for nearly a decade and had pretty much zero problems with it that I can remember. I’m confused why more people don’t use it. Sometimes I wonder if people like to make their lives difficult and use the latest shiny new thing just so they can use the latest shiny new thing.
We’ve even utilised it in non traditional ways as well, due to its flexibility - for instance we developed a few games (UE4 and Unity) for clients where we set up and managed various game properties for objects, enemy behaviour, etc. that games could then easily pull in dynamically as JSON allowing a quick and easy way for non developers to play with underlying game variables while play testing with no real programming experience. The simple tree hierarchy system, supplemented with things like repeaters, standard fields and in built selector functionality really makes it easy for anybody to get a handle on it in under ten minutes and feel at ease.
We’ve integrated it with horrendously bad client SSO systems with minimal effort as well, to speak of it’s somewhat fringe abilities.
The community is great as well, no politics and very active.
Disclosure: I’ve got no commercial interests in it, other than it’s made day to day life much easier and I’ll sing it’s praises at any opportunity.
I have worked primarily in Drupal or just directly in either Symfony or Laravel. Drupal 8 has a pretty sophisticated cache API and reading through the ProCache module description it sounds pretty similar (except that it appears to lack cache tags?).
Anyway, I certainly wouldn’t call Drupal or WordPress “the latest new thing” and in my experience at least Drupal does a solid job of getting out of your way as well.
If you wake up one day and decide you want to shove 20 million proteins into a Processwire site as individual pages, the community will immediately jump in and help you do it: https://processwire.com/talk/topic/25444-creating-20-million...
TBH, I probably would have approached this differently. When we’ve had big datasets, we’ve spun them out into another database entirely and just used Processwire for routing/API/business logic/hooks/security/etc. and hand cranked some DB queries as needed for the underlying data layer. Amazing to see what they did though.
Using it just as an API is also very nice.
You'd need to install several plugins to pull this off in WordPress, some of them paid (ACF Pro, etc.). And it's messy because the plugins weren't made to work together. Craft also supports Postgres in addition to MysQL/MariaDB, so that's another difference if you like or need PG.
It's more similar in scope to Drupal, but I find the developer and authoring experience much more elegant in Craft. Businesses are happy to pay $299. Both systems use Twig as their templating layer.
For reference, content management systems that target the mid-market and enterprise charge $XX,000 and up for licenses. See Sitecore or whatever Adobe is shilling these days.
There are hundreds of CMS options out there, lots of interesting approaches to choose from. Strapi and other headless JS-driven options are the current rage.
Source: I'm in the Craft pro network but have built 50+ WordPress sites as well. Prior to that I used ExpressionEngine, Textpattern, and Movable Type. Been around the block!
I wrote the "Features for Developers" page (https://wintercms.com/features/for-developers) on the Winter CMS site, which pretty much summarises my thoughts on the advantages of Winter CMS development.
I was using October CMS for years before I became a maintainer, and the thing that hooked me was the plugin architecture. It is incredibly simple to extend nearly every facet of the CMS to do what I want for my clients.
I've developed (and still do) develop WordPress sites, and I find trying to "extend" or customise some plugins to be like pulling teeth if they're not using the hook system correctly.
The fact it's built on, and supports most of the API of, Laravel is a bonus to me too.
I've dabbled a little in Drupal but don't have enough experience to give a good comparison in between those two.
Definitely should grab a bite again, although unfortunately that restaurant has closed :( Hit me up on the HackRegina Slack some time!
The remainder seem to be around updating the pipeline/other files to specify support for php 7.2-7.4 instead of 7.4+8.0 and a bunch of other documentation (phpdoc) changes.
What are the drastic breaking changes thusfar?
"If we discover what broke it, happy to backport the fix, but it appears broken due to some introduced reason that I'm not aware of
...
Please test in v2.0 and let me know if it still happens. Thanks"
https://github.com/octobercms/october/issues/5560#issuecomme...
I've been really disappointed when I hear the split of the project, then I finally understand both decisions here: - October became paid to generate more money than only fees from the marketplace - Winter will keep the project open source and hope that the marketplace and donations will be sufficient to make the project live long.
What's made me decide on which side I wanted to be was not the fact that the platform is paid or free, but more the fact that only one project will now consider their customers as developers and potential contributors.
On the October's side, you'll now just pay for a program that you'll run on your server as is, you could still develop custom plugins but the new features will now only be developed by the two creators (including one that I've never had the chance to discuss with or even read in two years of contributions). You now just can propose new features and hope that the developers will agree to develop them without any due date.
On the Winter's side there are 4 friendly developers, a world-wide active community and they've always been open to any contributions, including new features. The maintainers are focused on adding new features meanwhile asking for beginners' feedbacks to ease the introduction of new community members (and potential future contributors).
My thoughts is that October as of today is one step higher of Winter because they released a new fresh backend with some new (only front-end) features secretly developed by the creators without even telling it to the maintainers but Winter is already way more active into the development of new features due to the fact they can be added by anyone from the community.
I expect both project to live but the community of both projects will now include different kind of members, October's one will be full of customers, Winter's one will be full of contributors.
*the actual complete HTML! No CMS cruft or anything added to my websites pages I dont want to be there.
If you are looking for a CMS and have some coding skills I think you’ll very much enjoy working with this one.
Will be looking into how to update my websites to WinterCMS then.
I'd rather support a closed source project than a community that actively promotes toxic behaviour.