Context: I'm the creator an open source page builder in Ruby on Rails named Maglev (https://www.maglev.dev), pretty much similar to Primo (congrats for their product, looks amazing!).
A couple of months, I used my own tool (Maglev) when revamping an e-commerce site of a client who didn't have a content management system to edit the marketing part of her site.
So I sliced the site into editable "Maglev" sections/blocks. The result was great in terms of editing experience BUT a couple of months later after the launch, my client hired another marketing person with HTML/CSS "skills" (I'd say 101 HMTL/CSS level).
And I had a hard time to convince her that it was a bad idea to write HTML/CSS code herself but instead to let me (or another developer) write the missing sections she wanted.
A solution would have been to add in Maglev some kind of dev editor like in Primo. However, based on my long experience, you really don't want your client to touch the HTML/CSS of your site. And I don't believe in the "you break it, you pay for it" mojo or at least this is not the kind of relationship I want with my clients.
On a higher level, any kind of CMS has the same issue. For instance, I helped a company with a broken Webflow site and it was the typical issue: a designer built their site and later the marketing person tried to "improve" the UI and broke everything.
From a person outside the project, I understand that you may have been under the impression that the CMS did not evolve quicly enough. But believe me, we were working just as hard on it.
Actually, you cannot have a clear look at the project activity just based on the Engine github repository because LocomotiveCMS is relatively a big project, made of many different components (Wagon, CustomFields, Engine).
Besides, I even don't include the documentation site which has been greatly improved recently and it takes a long time to write documentation.
A lot of work for a very small team :-)
I've been working on this project for years and for free and no project is sustainable in those conditions. That's why I decided to grow the business and to develop the commercial side of LocomotiveCMS. So we launched LocomotiveHosting this summer. And it goes well beyond hosting. It also gives you access to free upgrades and premium support.
Moreover, the hosting solution relies on the same version of the engine. The slight difference is that we add maintenance functionalities like site backup on the fly.
LocomotiveHosting is an option. You can still host your sites on your servers, so this should not deter you from using our CMS. But we really appreciate it when our users sign up to LocomotiveHosting because this helps fund the development of new features.
hey @kiro, I'm Didier, creator of LocomotiveCMS (www.locomotivecms.com).
You do not need to re-deploy for a simple typo because the structure of your site and the content are definitely separated.
You or your content editor will use the user back-office to fix that typo.
However, if you want to change the layout or tweak the style, you have to use Wagon and its frontend tools (SASS, Compass, Less, Compass), make your changes, test them locally with the embedded web server in Wagon, commit them to git if you version your site structure and then deploy. The redeployment won't touch the live data unless you modified your data structure.
Hope my answer was clear :-)
We chose the tools that worked best for us and for our clients. LocomotiveCMS is already used by startups, web agencies, and big companies to design, deploy, and update sites every day. If Mongodb becomes a limiting factor, or if someone provides an equally elegant implementation on top of a RDMS, we'll happily switch. Until then, we'll focus on building our vision of the most elegant and friendly CMS possible.
Hi @rb2k_, thanks for the feedback.
About the demo link, since we do not have a stable version of the engine yet, we chose to disable our demo platform. But it'll be coming soon !
You're totally right about the installation procedure. Like the other open source projects such as Spree for instance, we miss an executable which will help users to start a new engine with ease. That could be perhaps your first contribution to the project :-)
I'm Didier Lafforgue, the guy behind LocomotiveCMS, one of the 2 first open source projects handled by Bushi.do. So I will speak for the open source developer inside me.
I won't say that building an open source project is quite easy but the coding part is definitively the easiest one for me. Unfortunately, a developer does not live with fresh water and (coding) love.
So when Sean and Kevin came to me and shared with me their vision about monetizing open source projects, it was obvious I had no choice than to say yes. Simply because their idea is brillant.
Actually, it lets the freedom for the authors of open source web applications to continue their development roadmap and at the same time, Bushi.do provides all the tools to promote and monetize the applications. I see that as a win-win situation.
And to go further, that could be become a game changer in the world of the open source web applications.
One last thing, the 2 guys behind Bushi.do are developers first and very nice guys....
Let clear something up. I'm sorry but I reread yours 2 comments and you seemed to speak for the whole community (I quote: "..to a community...who are also adamantly opposed to the idea of selling snippets of code."). I talked to a lot of ruby dev and no one told me they were oppposed to my idea. What I'm saying here is that you do not represent the ruby community, you only speak for yourself and perhaps your dev friends.
However, there is perhaps a misunderstanding. I don't want to build the mirror of a paid version of rubygems.com. I simply use the gem workflow mechanism (which is robust and easy to use) in order to sell modules BUT in the context of a project (open source or not).
Besides, in php, there already are open source projects successfully working this way, I'm thinking about prestashop for instance. I also learned that some companies sells redhat and debian packages. Why not in ruby ?
One last thing, I'm not defensive but your first post was not constructive enough. You talked about a similar experience you had before (I quote: "... as experience has taught me that buying plugins for an open-source codebase is not an ideal solution for my customers"). Could you tell more about that ?
That's the kind of answer I was expecting here.
Thanks anyway :-)
I should have explained the context of the idea. I just wanted to sell a tool for my cms (locomotivecms). This tool happens to be a ruby script which is regularly updated and that I want to sell to "finance" the cms (free of charge since it's an open source project).
And the best way I found is to sell it as a ruby gem so that the installation / update become easy for the ruby users.
By the way, the code is not obfuscated. So yes, basically, users who paid for the gems can put this in their own git repository and do "whatever" they want with it as long as they don't share it.
first, who speaks for the whole ruby community ? all the ruby/rails developers are a part of the ruby community but we never signed a paper telling us that we must not sell snippets of code.
Besides, just to remind you something, I spent an extraordinary number of (not paid) hours on my open source project which is used by people making money of it (which is fair and I'm totally fine with that).
Anyway, I don't have in mind to replace the ruby gems platform by something else which will be not free. really. And trust me, that won't happen because it won't work.
But, in some situations like mine with LocomotiveCMS, having a platform to sell modules (it happens that my modules are ruby gems) makes perfectly sense. And what I'm looking for here by posting this is to see if other people will be interested in as well.
I don't pretend to be a designer (I know how to use photoshop though) and I designed this page in 2 hours. I assume I follow the current trends. Nothing wrong, is it ?
A couple of months, I used my own tool (Maglev) when revamping an e-commerce site of a client who didn't have a content management system to edit the marketing part of her site. So I sliced the site into editable "Maglev" sections/blocks. The result was great in terms of editing experience BUT a couple of months later after the launch, my client hired another marketing person with HTML/CSS "skills" (I'd say 101 HMTL/CSS level). And I had a hard time to convince her that it was a bad idea to write HTML/CSS code herself but instead to let me (or another developer) write the missing sections she wanted.
A solution would have been to add in Maglev some kind of dev editor like in Primo. However, based on my long experience, you really don't want your client to touch the HTML/CSS of your site. And I don't believe in the "you break it, you pay for it" mojo or at least this is not the kind of relationship I want with my clients.
On a higher level, any kind of CMS has the same issue. For instance, I helped a company with a broken Webflow site and it was the typical issue: a designer built their site and later the marketing person tried to "improve" the UI and broke everything.