geniestreiche Posted December 19, 2012 Share Posted December 19, 2012 the free non-commercial version of ee is back... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
onjegolders Posted December 20, 2012 Share Posted December 20, 2012 the free non-commercial version of ee is back... Was that a hasty decision I wonder based on the backlash they'd received from their followers? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
diogo Posted December 21, 2012 Share Posted December 21, 2012 @diogo: "I'm a graphic designer with very basic knowledge of PHP" You're far too modest! Thanks for saying that, but where did you find this? I don't remember in what context I wrote it... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arcturus Posted January 2, 2013 Share Posted January 2, 2013 the free non-commercial version of ee is back... Interesting, but too little too late as far as I'm concerned. I was all set to build my first EE site a month ago when they pulled that "license simplification" malarkey overnight, which sent me on a lengthy exploration of various CMS systems and eventually led me here. I can't really think of a reason I'd ever go back. 9 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kevinm Posted January 3, 2013 Share Posted January 3, 2013 Hey Matthew and others, I came across this post while researching ProcessWire and was wondering about your calculations a bit. You say same-day support comes down to $23998 per year, but in my eyes, it comes down to $3588 (The level you mention actually provides and I quote Ellislab on this: "guaranteed first response in 4 business hours") Also, you note that the cost for a SINGLE site is $24000, which is true but you fail to mention that with ten additional sites, the platinum support would still handle your queries, at no extra cost apart from the initial $1999 per month fee. Please note that I am in no way affiliated with Ellislab, other than being a previous customer and now looking strongly at ProcessWire, but this seems to be a lot of FUD. Compare this to the support options of ProcessWire. Yes, it is open-source, so I can just go in and fix bugs myself (do most users really do that, though?) At the same point: ExpressionEngine code is unencrypted, so I could, in theory, fix bugs myself (I am just less likely, seeing how this is a bug they should fix, not me). PW support here is free, but what happens if I run a client's site and something breaks and I need support right now? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joss Posted January 3, 2013 Share Posted January 3, 2013 HI Kevnm, welcome to the friendliest (and occasionally silliest) forum in existence. Sorry everyone is so late in answering your post ... must be faster!!! (Or, in my case, would help if I was younger and cleverer!) You are right, there is no paid or guaranteed support with ProcessWIre (though as it grows bigger I am sure someone somewhere may start supplying such a service) and as such is a different business model. But I have to say, these are some of the most responsive forums I have ever come across - though quite what would happen if 10,000 users turned up with question ... *gulp* Still, the look on Ryan's face would be worth photographing. I think there is an interesting on going general discussion about support throughout the business sector generally. I tend to use my brother as a bench mark. Despite having been very senior in Sun Microsystems in the UK and Xerox, he is not technical, and now that he runs a boutique with his wife he is relying on local support for computers and websites and so on. Generally speaking the phrase "I am getting ripped off" seems to turn up regularly. And, as he has found out to his cost, you are not to know the true quality of that support until you actually need it. In his case, two years into a project, something went wrong and the monthly support fee he had paid did not match the fact that the company could not solve his problem. (I solved it for him in 2 minutes flat eventually, and I am not an admin by any stretch of the administration.) If you pay $2000 a year to a company for support, at the end of the day you have to make sure that you are actually getting your monies worth. It should not be some over priced insurance system, it should be paid for work. If you are paying a lot more than that, then the company better have some amazing reasons for charging so much. I have no idea whether EE is good value or not (I have no way of judging) but it certainly is the case that if they lose people from the bottom of the ladder then they risk loosing future big spenders, which may be why they have had a change of heart. Have fun with PW - the rest of us are!! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MatthewSchenker Posted January 3, 2013 Share Posted January 3, 2013 Hey Everyone, Joss, can you fix the link in your last post? It's kind of truncated... Thanks, Matthew Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pete Posted January 3, 2013 Share Posted January 3, 2013 I've not used much non-open source software and haven't used EE, but even those revised prices look silly to me - but hey, I'm used to free or cheap software What's the turnaround time on a support ticket from EE, or is there actually an option to call someone on the phone directly within that price (and if there is has anyone called it if so to see if someone is there)? I'd say that ProcessWire's free support is worth more than a lot of paid support options with other software packages. With support tickets from various web hosts for example I'm used to 15-30 minute response times, forum software is more like 24 hours (but it's cheap, so you're not paying for premium support), but you'll usually get a response here on the forums with ProcessWire within an hour, maybe 2, and quite often with chunks of useful code supplied which I would rate at more useful than the extortionate price of $3588 for "guaranteed first response in 4 business hours" which sounds like it could just be an acknowledgement of your initial request if I put my skeptical hat on for a minute - but again I don't know about EE or the company behind it. I know many business customers would like a paid support option for ProcessWire but I think that's something for ryan to weigh in on. For some random form of not-really-comparison, with a hundreds-of-thousands-of-pounds server solution from HP, the guaranteed 4 hour response time costs around £15k. That's actually nearly equivalent to the $23998 for the 4 hour guaranteed response time from Ellislab. Their product does not cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and is not as complicated as a reasonably high level server solution so there is something wrong with that figure to my mind. (P.S. I'm not affiliated with ProcessWire myself - I just look after the forums and make module occasionally ) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joss Posted January 3, 2013 Share Posted January 3, 2013 Hey Everyone, Joss, can you fix the link in your last post? It's kind of truncated... Thanks, Matthew Evening Matthew Er .... which link? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
diogo Posted January 3, 2013 Share Posted January 3, 2013 Matthew, you really need to clean your firefox... 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Soma Posted January 3, 2013 Share Posted January 3, 2013 Omg the internet is full of links!! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adam Kiss Posted January 3, 2013 Share Posted January 3, 2013 I came across this post while researching ProcessWire and was wondering about your calculations a bit. You say same-day support comes down to $23998 per year, but in my eyes, it comes down to $3588 (The level you mention actually provides and I quote Ellislab on this: "guaranteed first response in 4 business hours") Well, one business day guaranteed (and it's just a first response!), isn't anywhere close to same-day support. Even if you reported the bug first thing in the morning you are not guaranteed to have first reponse the same day. Also, you note that the cost for a SINGLE site is $24000, which is true but you fail to mention that with ten additional sites, the platinum support would still handle your queries, at no extra cost apart from the initial $1999 per month fee. And this is true. Note: this is just from reading through the EE store Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
justkev Posted January 3, 2013 Share Posted January 3, 2013 From their website, "Q: When is EllisLab Support available to help? Our customer support team—we call them our Customer Advocates—is available to help Monday through Friday from 7:00am to 3:00pm Pacific Time." So for $1900 a month, their highest level of support offered... You can get support only between those hours? Even their "Urgent Response", 2 hour tickets seem to stick to the business hour rule. What a deal Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Soma Posted January 3, 2013 Share Posted January 3, 2013 From 7 to 3 pm spacific time for that price?! So are the chicks and beer included? For that price i expect them to clean my shoes too Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
justkev Posted January 3, 2013 Share Posted January 3, 2013 From 7 to 3 pm spacific time for that price?! So are the chicks and beer included. For that price i expect them to clean my shoes too I just couldn't imagine anyone paying that kind of money for support that isn't even open on the weekends. What happens to the guy that pays his $1900 payment for 10 months and finally needs "urgent support" at 5pm on a Friday? Crazy... 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
joshuag Posted January 3, 2013 Share Posted January 3, 2013 liked on alternativeto. I also used to really love EE and CI. But PW pretty much stole the show. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kevinm Posted January 4, 2013 Share Posted January 4, 2013 Thanks for the comments all and thanks for taking the highroad and opting not to bash me out of existence for asking the (for other providers, anyway) hard questions. I agree with the support being offered by EE to be subpar; which is why I am strongly looking at PW. I'm sure you guys will find me on these forums more often 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joss Posted January 4, 2013 Share Posted January 4, 2013 And you will be very welcome here ... I mean, they put up with me! One important side to support, however, is documentation - if the docs are clever enough, the support load reduces hugely. If they are enormous but unfathomable, then support requests are going to go through the roof. It is one thing that several people here are scratching their heads over - how to come up with various documentation styles from walk-throughs to snippets to the API so that as this grows new users (even with low tech abilities like me) can answer many of their own support questions easily and quickly without the headaches. That leaves the forums for the unexpected, unusual, down-right strange and other general frolics! Joss Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
diogo Posted January 4, 2013 Share Posted January 4, 2013 Nice to know you will be sticking around, and be very welcome! You will understand why people here defend so much PW as an alternative to EE as soon as you start building your first webpage Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ryan Posted January 4, 2013 Share Posted January 4, 2013 ProcessWire will have support contract options available in 2013. I'm still working out the details, but wanted to let you know that option will be there for those that want it. Most of us here don't and won't need support contracts, because we can get pretty much anything resolved in a manner of minutes via these forums. But I would gather that a large portion of PW's user base doesn't actually participate in these forums. I also think that there are companies out there that would feel much better having the insurance of guaranteed support when they need it. Basically, if someone feels they need a support contract, I want to make sure we can accommodate that. I also see this as a way to further support growth of the project.As for EllisLab, I think they may be in a tough spot and trying to find the best way to survive and hopefully thrive. I had heard unsubstantiated rumors on Twitter several months ago that they might make EE free. To me suggested they might not be thriving as a business the way I would have thought. In such a case, change could be necessary in order to grow rather than contract. I have no idea if this is true (it's all guessing), and it's a little hard for me to imagine how they could not be profitable… given that their entire user base pays to use the software. But I don't think they would have made such drastic changes if everything was okay with the business model and finances before. My guess is they were faced with the choice of having to make cutbacks (like staff), stagnate, or make big changes.It appears they opted for big changes and are trying to re-focus their resources towards the high-end. That being the 20% of the audience that can pay the big bucks, at the expense of the other 80% that doesn't pay as well. And have probably accepted the sacrifices that go along with it. For that 20%, these costs are not really that big, and are probably seen to strengthen the B2B commitment (greater cost sometimes feels like greater insurance and less risk). There are other big players out there paying hundreds of thousands of dollars (every year) to companies with products that are inferior to EE. There are more opportunities to grow for them there than there are on the open source side. After all, products like ProcessWire and others are just as capable (and many would say more-so). It's not sustainable and makes little sense in a for-profit business to plan growth competing against a worldwide network of developers working for free. It's hard to grow a business when most of your competition is at least as good, and free. Whereas, I think it makes good business sense for them to carve out some new space where there is opportunity and partnership with bigger players. That's the side where the service matters as much, or more, than the software itself. And they can do well at both.I'm hoping that ProcessWire and other open source CMSs can benefit and grow as a result of changes with EllisLab. But I also hope that EllisLab and ExpressionEngine benefit and grow in the way they want to. Looking at where they are and what they are, it's not hard to understand why they've refocused. Though I say that as an outsider that's not negatively affected by their decision. Regardless of whether you like EE or not, it is in a fairly unique spot in the CMS landscape as a commercial product that is often listed with, and interchanged with, open source products. It's not something that I think could be repeated today, and I've always had a lot of respect for what they've been able to do and the influence they've had. EE is a good software with good people behind it. I'd like to see them do well and think that they will. 8 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aleksblendwerk Posted January 5, 2013 Share Posted January 5, 2013 I am currently in the process of setting up a site with ProcessWire and pretty much the only alternatives for me were ExpressionEngine and WordPress. WordPress just isn't built for anything but blog posts (I am aware of the 'custom post types' but it's a real pain requiring tons of hacks) and while I used to be a fan of ExpressionEngine it's just not a good fit if you don't have $ to spend. There are excellent add-ons for EE but I'd need quite a couple of them to get the same functionality that PW provides (Playa versus multiple related pages/PageArray in PW, Matrix versus Repeaters in PW). Additionally the limitations of the free version (e.g. the discussion forums being missing) and the license fee kicking in as soon as I try to monetize a site in any way kind of make me hesitate building the kind of "Let's see how this works out" projects that I often mess with on EE. I am not sure whether the concept of EE served as an inspiration or blueprint for PW, as they are really quite similar but as others have pointed out in this thread, the whole transition should be super-easy as a lot of the site building blocks are the same. Even if you didn't intend to do so (and I don't think so at all), you have created quite the 'ExpressionEngine killer' here... and eventually the word will spread. That said, ExpressionEngine is a great product and I hope EE (the product), the community and EllisLab keep on going strong. And if you can afford it and your customer feels better about using a 'commercial' product backed and supported by a company, definitely go for it. From what I have seen so far the EE backend still seems more 'pro' and if you use the right add-ons, a couple of parts are more convenient and polished. (That won't stay like that forever though.) 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ryan Posted January 5, 2013 Share Posted January 5, 2013 I am not sure whether the concept of EE served as an inspiration or blueprint for PW, as they are really quite similar but as others have pointed out in this thread, the whole transition should be super-easy as a lot of the site building blocks are the same. Most of what you see in ProcessWire was developed long before I'd ever used or seen ExpressionEngine in action (or any other CMS for that matter). I can't speak for some of the 3rd party admin themes that apparently have some similarity, but ProcessWire itself has had no influence from EE. Still, I think it's a compliment when people think there are similarities, because that suggests to me that they are familiar with EE and finding points of comfort with ProcessWire. I also think that ProcessWire and EE have a similar audience, often trying to accomplish similar things. Personally, I don't have a sense of what the similarities are because I see them as opposites in many ways. ProcessWire is tree-hierarchy based, EE is bucket based. ProcessWire is PHP-API based, EE is tag/template-engine based based. These are huge differences. I suppose the main similarity I can find is that they keep the developer in control of the markup. But of course, a lot of other systems do too. Honestly, while I've used EE2 before, I've never gotten deep enough into it to be able to evaluate all the differences fairly. What other points of similarity have you guys found? Also if there are areas where EE seems more 'pro' perhaps it would be good for us to evaluate and learn from these things. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
apeisa Posted January 5, 2013 Share Posted January 5, 2013 Personally, I don't have a sense of what the similarities are because I see them as opposites in many ways. ProcessWire is tree-hierarchy based, EE is bucket based. ProcessWire is PHP-API based, EE is tag/template-engine based based. These are huge differences. I suppose the main similarity I can find is that they keep the developer in control of the markup. I think biggest similarity is that both have custom fields / templates / content types as a native way of doing things. This of course then leads to full control on markup. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ryan Posted January 8, 2013 Share Posted January 8, 2013 I see my message above got quoted from an EE-related Twitter account. Just want to clarify that I have no idea what actual reasons prompted EllisLab changes or what their strategy might be. But just find the changes interesting and am making guesses. Another thought that crossed my mind is that it could have all been prompted by some new investors. But my guesses probably sound silly to someone that actually knows about it all. Maybe someone else can chime in about it. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MatthewSchenker Posted January 9, 2013 Share Posted January 9, 2013 Hey Ryan, This is interesting. Seems like you are getting attention in the EE world! Maybe you should keep posting and see how it gets reported over there. Thanks, Matthew Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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