I’m not sure “porting concrete to a commercial platform” is a fair representation of what we’ve done here. Concrete is still fully open source under the MIT license. If we wanted to “port concrete to a commercial platform” we’d strip all the advanced functionality out of concrete (permissions, workflow, multi-site, multi-lingual, etc), call that Concrete PRO or something and sell that for thousands a year to compete with Kentico and Sitecore. We haven’t done that.
What we did do was take down a 15 year old marketplace full of abandoned products that were getting no support and replace it with a completely rebuilt marketplace with a codebase we can maintain. We removed any product that was getting no support, and we did change to a model where extensions would have a recurring revenue model instead of a one off in the hopes that it would motivate developers to keep updating their extensions over time.
If you’ve been upgrading your Concrete site over the years, the extent of the impact here is you have to reconnect to the community, which incidentally is wildly easier now.
If you’ve not been upgrading your Concrete site, again there is really no impact to you as you can leave that code up running on a PHP LTS setup for as long as you want. There weren’t updates happening to these v8 extensions happening anyway.
In addition to all of that, we’ve repeatedly made the offer that if someone has purchased a v8 or earlier extension and they need a copy of that package, we’ll do our best to go manually get it if they simply ask. That’s not a very scalable solution but at the end of the day, but we’re not trying to cause pain for anyone. If there’s something simple we can do to help, we’re always going to try.
What I do find a little frustrating at this point is being the whipping post for technology changing at all. Look Andy and I reminisce about how simple the web used to be vs. what we do today frequently. “Remember when version control used to be renaming index.html to index.bak and LeechFTP was all the CI/CD we needed? Remember when writing PHP didn’t feel like writing Java?” That’s a nice release to talk about after a beer on a Friday afternoon, but I can’t stop time.
I wish PHP 8 didn’t require the changes it did to code.
I wish the web projects I designed and built back in the aughts would have served those client’s needs forever.
That said, we work in a medium that changes a lot, and we need to move forward. We’ve put a lot of work into making upgrading workable. It’s pretty disappointing to be told we’re leaving “devoted users behind” because we don’t want to sell unsupported extensions and encourage use of end of life software.
