MojoMotor, the light CMS released by EllisLab in 2010, is now officially nearing end of life. Today at the ExpressionEngine Conference in Alexandria, VA, EllisLab announced that the product was no longer being actively developed and had one year of support left.
The popular Mac text editor TextMate may never see an update but at least people are still creating useful bundles that make using the abandonware even easier.
Ed Finkler (affectionately known as “funkatron” on the Twitters) created a TextMate bundle for MojoMotor templates and markup. Version 0.1 was released back in June and you can grab the bundle from GitHub. (Psssst, Ed, make a proper download under the Downloads section on GitHub. It’s easier for non-GitHubbians to grab the bundle). I still use the original TextMate bundle for EE template code and add-on development. Has anyone created EE 2 version of those?
Pop over to the site and check it out. And while you’re there, drop Jesse a note and thank him for the new resource. Keeping sites like that (and this site) running and regularly updated is no small task.
There has been a lot of activity in the MojoMotor world since the software was released last month. Add-ons, community websites and websites built with MojoMotor have all surfaced.
Here’s a roundup of some of what has been going on.
The CodeIgniter workshop is a high-level overview of CI and takes place over the course of 3 hours. At the end of the session you should be able to build a very simple CI application. Thomas wrote a great book on CodeIgniter (it’s the one I bought and sits on the bookshelf in my office), so you couldn’t ask for a better teacher.
The second session covers MojoMotor development. This isn’t about how to build a website with MojoMotor but instead how to developer extensions (add-ons) for it. This class does ask that you come with an “understanding of CodeIgniter and OO PHP in order to get anything out of this class.”
Today Derek Allard posted to the MojoMotor blog with his thoughts on the warm welcome that his little CMS has received. In response to the myriad of add-ons and resources available, he wrote:
Stunning. Believe me when I say that I know how good we have it. Let me re-iterate here. MojoMotor isn’t even a week old. And like any new product, you expect a few bugs to get found. Mojo is of course not exempt, but what is telling is the reaction. People wanted to help fix them, and help make MojoMotor better. Videos were made, code was examined - it makes me proud to be involved.
In case you haven’t heard, MojoMotor is a “publishing engine that does less” and was launched last week. It is available for $49.95 per site license and a great way to manage small sites that don’t require a blog or larger CMS (like ExpressionEngine). Last week, I posted a video of MojoMotor and showed how it runs my book marketing website.
Soon, I hope to have an interview about MojoMotor with Derek posted but until I can get him the questions and his responses, we’ll settle for this interesting nugget from his personal blog:
Mojo is something that I’ve been working on since around Christmas last year, and its been nearly everything I’ve been up to professionally for 5 months. Anyone who’s watched my keynote at EECI2009 knows that I’m a “social coder”. I crave community; and I consider nerding-out with other people to be foundational to the way I work. Keeping Mojo under wraps for 5 months has been killing me! I want to share, I want to say “hey, check out this cool thing I’ve been doing”, but we decided very early on that we wanted Mojo to come as a total surprise. Now that its out there, I’m glad we did.
Response to the news of Mojo has been overwhelmingly positive. I’m really hopeful that people will end up loving it as much as they love CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine. I few secret tidbits that not many people know about MojoMotor:
MojoMotor was a name that Rick grabbed years ago. He just liked the sound of it. As I was developing MojoMotor it started out with a much different name, but it was quickly apparent that “MojoMotor” was the right name for the little CMS.
“The publishing engine that does less…” and the concept for the logo both came about in less then 3 minutes during a Skype call between me and Rick.
Other parts of the software that I expected to come quickly took WEEKS. Funny how that works.
The graphic artist who helped us along was Ilina Simeonova. She did stellar work, and her dedication to a project that she had little invested in was inspiring.
As I posted previously, there is no release date set and the final product will cost $49.95 US per license.
So, yesterday everyone was anticipating an announcement about EE 2 (which we got) but there was a big surprise, too: MojoMotor.
This new, lightweight content management system from EllisLab places them squarely in the same space as offerings like Perch. During the initial announcement EllisLab’s Derek Allard didn’t offer many details other than a preview video (which you can watch on the MojoMotor website) but later held an impromptu in-between session to answer more questions and share more information.
So, here are some details:
MojoMotor will cost $49 US per license
PHP 5+ is required
Can run on either MySQL or SQLite3 databases(great news!)
Requires a “modern” browser: Firefox 3+, Safari 4+, Chrome and Internet Explorer 8.
You can import a MojoMotor site into EE 2 if you need to upgrade to a more robust solution.
There is still no word on when the new CMS will be available as beta or final release. Hopefully EllisLab will be releasing some more information soon.
Today at the EECI 2010 conference EllisLab announced a new product: MojoMotor. It is a simpler, lightweight content management system which allows you to easily edit and update your site right from the front-end.
Derek Allard played a demo video that quickly ran through all of the functionality of MojoMotor. You can watch part of the video from the EE Insider Twitter feed.
There were no details shared on when MojoMotor would be available but hopefully we will get more updates soon.
From my view, MojoMotor looks like it could be a great solution for blogs and other small content sites. I’m already eyeing as a CMS to replace the EE install powering my small, simple and rarely updated personal site. It’s also a nice solution for those client projects that don’t require a larger application.
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There has been a lot of activity in the 