MODX initial release was called "Evolution" and since then it is being actively developed and improved by contributors all around the world. In 2010 MODX developers released new CMS called Revolution.

MODX Revolution and Evolution CMS shares the same philosophy and it is a "Creative Freedom". For a long time both systems were developed by one team but then the 2017 came.

The Big Change

In April 2017 MODX turned over Evolution development completely to its current community-driven leadership team. This means that Evolution (called „Evolution CMS” or „EVO”) and Revolution were two separate products since.

And it raised a lot of questions and doubts about the future of the "new" EVO.

Future of Evolution CMS

If that made you concerned, don't worry. EVO future looks good and more than safe. New development team see this change as a great opportunity to make EVO better than ever before.

This active development can be seen since EVO 1.2.0 release, where backend got a new default theme and many new features were added to the core. More regular release cycle was also introduced. Release 1.3.3 from July 2017 was very exciting for all EVO users. It got new, official logo and massive improvements to the backend.

Manager was extremely improved. It received completely new Dropdown Based Navbar, cool new features like Grouping Template Variables by category into sections/tabs, Global Tabs for editing multiple resources at the same time, Live Search from navbar, rewritten Welcome Screen Widgets, highly Customizable Site Tree items along with Drag and Drop.

To be honest, at this point version number should have jumped to 2.x!

At MODXpo 2017 in Minsk, Dmytro Lukianenko showed off the current state of Evolution CMS. You can watch it here. You can also download MODXpo 2017 Evolution presentation (PDF).

I'm also supporting EVO by contributing on Github.

Future of MODX

MODX Revolution is stable and in a very good shape. Also highly anticipated MODX3 project is slowly taking form. That's very good news.

At MODXpo 2017 in Minsk, Gauke Pieter Sietzema from Sterc, covered the plans of MODX3: extracting dependencies from the core, making MODX composer installable and UI/UX improvements (new login, an improved dashboard) and improvements to the resource-editing screen.

You can watch it here.

Which one should I use?

You may wonder "So which one should I use?". The answer is simple. Use the one that fits project requirements best. Both systems have their strengths and weaknesses.

Personally I believe in "using the right tool for the job", therefore there are projects where I use MODX Revolution (multi-site, complex user access policies) but in most cases EVO does the job perfectly.

Check also "What's MODX & Evolution CMS and why we love it" article!

evo, modx