3 Reasons why I am convinced of OctoberCMS

Sam — Tue, 27 Jul 2021 11:26:24 +0000

1. It's for everyone

Programmers, Designers, Clients... There is something for everyone. Programmers who are already familiar with the Laravel framework will feel right at home in the structures and the core architecture, they may only miss Blade as templating engine, but Twig is at least as easy and convenient as Blade. Designers are delighted with the Monaco Editor (which powers Visual Studio Code) in the backend area and the bundling engine, which allows to write everything directly in SASS (or Less) and leave the rest to October. Clients will love the simplified interface to create static pages, menus and blog entries, designed to be at least as easy as WordPress. All of them provided by additional extensions, which are also developed by the core team.

2. It ain't too easy

As Einstein said "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.". WordPress made the interface as well as the programming part way simpler as possible, allowing young developers to quickly achieve success writing a plugin or theme. A good thing at first, however, this leads also to dozens or hundreds of extensions which may add an important function, but are written so inexperienced that they should not be used in production. It's not a rumor, that many WordPress websites are vulnerable, not because of using WordPress itself, moreover because they use one or more plugins with highly important security vulnerabilities. Basic security flaws, such as XSS or SQL-Injections are still a thing within the WordPress community.

Of course, OctoberCMS can also be subject of poorly written extensions, but the entry barrier is a bit higher than with WordPress. I'm not saying that OctoberCMS and Laravel are really hard to learn and use, but definitely not as simple as WordPress. Additionally, Laravel offers way more possibilities to write secure and may also better code. Thinking of Eloquent ORM, the Validator, Observers, Behaviours, and so on.

3. It's modern

Laravel is one of the most modern PHP Frameworks in the world wide web. Accompanied by a extremely good documentation, you can set up relatively large projects relatively quickly. OctoberCMS does not only depend on Laravel, it lives the Laravel philosophy, extends and uses the system as it should be. If you know Laravel, you know October. If you aren't familiar with Laravel, you should take the step, because it is really worth it. It seems like every function, every line of code is extremely carefully thought out and it supports writing secure and clean code on such an extensive scale. Again, it's not impossible writing "bad" code in Laravel too, but I think it will be a challenge though.

4. It's fun working with

And the most important reason why I'm really convinced of using OctoberCMS is that it is just fun to work with. Of course, sometimes there are a few challenges as well, but so far nothing has left me in despair. It just makes fun coding again, after I had to work with Typo3, Prestashop and Moodle and lost myself in the horrible undocumented architecture of Kibana. Therefore I'm just really glad to have something like OctoberCMS and Laravel.

October CMS, as you know it, is still alive

Sam — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 10:59:55 +0000

Disclaimer: This post refers to the Winter CMS article October CMS as you know it is Dead and only reflects my unbiased opinion. I'm also not affiliated with October CMS or the (former) development or maintenance team.

What happened?

October CMS has turned itself into a paid product, still self-hosted and yes even for non-commercial website owners. This realignment is justified with targeting the existing user group of » professional developers and digital studios «, according to the linked article. However, this probably led to internal disputes between the core developers and the maintaince team and resulted into a new fork called Winter CMS. This way a part of the former team keeps the latest FOSS version of October CMS alive, which currently also works on additional features and known services, such as an Winter-version of October's Marketplace.

Such topics are not uncommon, especially in the open source community. Elasticsearch, for example, recently caused a wave of furors when they migrated their license away from APACHE 2.0. Another examples are ClassicPress (fork of WordPress), Inkscape (fork of SodiPodi, which itself is a fork of Gill), Joomla (fork of Mambo) or MariaDB (fork of MySQL), just to name a few more popular ones. Every fork is based on a caused problem.

That's the good thing about OpenSource software, if you aren't happy with the current development in any way, you can just grap the source and continue writing your own version and may build up your own fantastic community.

What's the issue?

Now, turning free software into paid one is nothing unusual and mostly has a primary purpose: Keeping a product really alive. Even if there is no guarantee here either it still increase the chance when several developers are able to work full-time without worrying about their own financial situations at all.

» GitHub stars won’t pay your rent «.
– Kitze in his medium post

Of course, draftspunk and Aleksey could have offer a hosted SaaS Version of October CMS (like Automatic did with WordPress), sell certificates, trainings or books (like Typo3, Shopware, Drupal and many others), sell personal data (like PrestaShop) or just sell an extended professional version (like Statamic) or offer a basic one (like Magento and WoltLab did once). But no, they decide to turn October into a paid product, $9.00 for single websites or $150.00 / $600.00 / € 1,400.00 for unlimited licenses including a bunch of business stuff, all of them paid per year.

Personally, I support this decision, even if I'm not a professional studio or, lets say, someone who makes money using October CMS. I support the development of a great product, which is not dead at all, just demands what it deserves... Financial Support.

Obviously, not everyone shares this thoughts, and that's totally fine! As I wrote before, Open Source lives from the community and when they partly disagree, a division will be inevitable.

Anyway

Winter CMS may be able to live next to October CMS with the same amount of follower, may become more popular, or may ends up like ClassicPress or Thirty Bees (Okay the last one is still on the road, wish my best luck here).

In any case, they only thing I really want to express with this article is, that October CMS should not be blamed for turning itself into something financially viable. Even if it was FOSS before and even if it brought some kind of revolution to the whole CMS world. It's a really brave move, and I honestly respect and support this.

PS.:

Saying "October CMS [...] is dead" (the real title that will stick with most readers) because it is not FOSS anymore is exactly the poison which should be avoided within the Open Source community. I don't blame the fork at all, I just dislike the message which is expressed by those who forked.

DEV Community: Sam