Structure 2.0

I would like to reiterate an earlier request that you guys consider tiered licensing so that non-commercial sites don’t have to give up Structure. $65 is going to be a hard sell for home users and tiny nonprofits, who would really benefit from Structure.

I’ll still be using Structure for commercial client sites, you betcha, and they won’t mind paying the $65. But that on top of $99 for the EE license starts feeling like a big bite to people who just want to run a blog… and who might be commercial customers later once they see how awesome EE is.

I’ve still got a copy of 1.3.1, and i can still install THAT for home users if need be – but i’d RATHER support you guys. I just can’t sell $65 of extra software to my parents, my friends, etc. Selling the $99 worth of EE is hard enough. $25 extra i might be able to do.

I agree strongly, not only about Structure, but similar commercial addon’s for 2.0. A separate add-on price for non-profits can be easily rationalized since EllisLab itself prices on a consistent two-tier basis.

Point:

I have found myself in the past week thinking that I will probably stay with 1.6.8 for non-profit and/or personal work because it is becoming evident that a useful set of 2.0 addon’s plus 2.0 will perhaps come to an increasingly expanding multiple hundreds of dollars. Over time, I believe there will be price-competition with 2.0 addon’s, but ‘time’ probably means two to three+ years. Alas, 100% of my work at this time is non-commercial.

Even when proposing add-on’s for business sites, I suspect it will be uncomfortable to defend EE 2.0’s commercial price ($299.00) alongside single add-on prices of $50-$90 (?), however useful a particular add-on may be. Clients have always tended to see something ‘wrong’ about out-of-ratio vendor/extension pricing on integrated software platforms.

Obviously, no one can or should regulate this! And, no doubt, Structure is one of the best, if not the best, add-on module ever created. In fact, if any module can justify a high price, this is it; so no rip intended here on Structure or Travis. Probably, I should cross-post this to a more generalized thread.

I am writing mainly because, at this early stage, the pricing that is set by some of the leading add-on vendors will have a knock-on effect in the first year or two with EE 2.0 that might produce unintended and not entirely positive consequences for the community. Also, since it appears possible EllisLab might stay away from, say, dramatically enhancing Pages with Structure available, we may not be able to count on high-performance native modules that meet fairly universal needs.

This is entirely selfish. It bums me out big-time to think that prudent personal/non-profit sites may have to restrict themselves to 1.6.8, even though the pricing of the EE 2.0 platform is itself eminently generous. Or, to put it this way:

Structure is probably worth $100. But, then EE 2.0 non-profit would probably be reasonable at $250 instead of $150. EllisLab is, in a sense, deeply discounting 2.0’s objective value to meet other long-term business objectives.

Now, may they, Travis and all the other add-on developers price their add-on’s wherever they are comfortable, high or low. They have no ‘social obligation’ to price lower. Let their profits be maximized! If I wanted open-source, there is always that other pseudo-CMS product whose name will not be mentioned.

In a sense, I’m asking practically: will Structure’s profits be maximized this way? or is there a way to reach the same profitability (or perhaps greater) with somewhat different pricing strategies that are a more elegant fit with EE 2.0’s own pricing.

Travis, again, nothing personal. Structure is incredibly good; support included. May it live long and prosper cash-wise …

EDIT: And I note that I am speculating entirely about EllisLab’s own reasons for the price points. If any staff are reading, EE 2.0’s true value to non-profits is surely no more than $49.95 😉.

I’m really curious – what is the total project price for these projects where the client balks at a couple hundred bucks for the software?

Brendon, there are a few other posts on other threads where I enthusiastically defend the low price point of EE 1.X or 2.X plus add-on’s for commercial projects. I am speaking only of non-profit/personal projects. Non-profits have a hard time these days justifying anything other than open source, period, unless they are the non-profit equivalent of a reasonably big commercial operation.

My seat-of-the-pants estimate for commercial sites with 2.0/forum, plus the likely (?) prices of a reasonable set of powerful add-on’s runs to $600-$900. Except for really small businesses, who function like non-profits when it comes to computing, no serious business should balk at the price range I just estimated relative to the value of the EE platform; with a serious design/development budget also a no-brainer. And my price range is considerably above what you suggested though you might have been thinking of non-profits too.

It’s a rock-solid principle that no one (even open source designers and developers) should work with clients who are nickel-and-diming the web investment they claim they want to make. That wasn’t my intention here and I apologize if it came across that way.

I’m just hopeful that some add-on developers will adopt the two-tier pricing that EllisLab uses and am offering a bit of potential rationale - no developer, though, should or will do this unless it makes business sense for them.

Travis,

It looks like 2.0 will be a bigger boon to me than even v1 was. I’ve plunked down the cash this afternoon. I’ve installed the module on my dev machine by copying over the files from my 1.3.1 installation. It seems to mostly work, but I’ve found this interesting bit:

When I try to add a new page with the “Enable Child-Page Weblog Picker” set to “Yes”, it only displays the beginning of a modal dialog - there are no choices or even a submit button.

More curiouser: when I hover over the “+add pages” link, I see a URL that ends with the following string:

&M=Structure#entry_<?=$eid;?>

That would seem to indicate that it’s not processing some php somewhere.

Thoughts?

RE: Pricing - Some of this is pretty off topic for Structure 2.0 and this thread. Good discussion, but let’s keep relevant issues where they belong. Right now, we’re offering a single license for all users and sites that is $65. It’s a fairly minimal cost and I don’t see it as a huge barrier against smaller projects, companies or personal users. The cost of both Structure and EE is still incredible cheap even on shoestring budgets. Maybe it won’t work for everyone or someone won’t want to drop the money, but that’s their choice and I think the value added far outweighs the cost. I see your points about tiered licensing, but I think at the current price point we’re being very fair.

@RedSteve Thanks for purchasing Structure. That’s a new one on me. I saw your license purchase, so I’m shooting you an email about it and that purchase address.

Travis,

Thanks for the reply. I’ll continue using 1.3.1 for personal & family projects, then. For commercial projects, going forward, i’ll definitely be using 2.0! $65 is DEFINITELY a great price for commercial use of this module. Thanks again for creating it, it’s a huge help.

Am i correct that there is the undocumented feature {exp:structure:nav_full} in the 2.0 release?

@Verdel Doesn’t work 😊

Thanks to @rockthenroll, both for the quick support in resolving my issue, and for a providing a kick-ass module! This new version has just made my IA and development life infinitely easier!

Back op topic, what’s the likelihood of seeing Structure output sub nav within the main nav tag? I’d like to be able to create suckerfish style menus on a site using Structure but that cannot currently be done. I looked into using the sitemap tag as a workaround since it outputs a multi-level list and I was wondering why that can’t be done with the main nav tag as well? Add that and the ability to create multiple structures for managing main nav, global nav and navigation and I’ll use this almost exclusively for the type of websites I tend to do these days. I want to keep the sub nav tag, I just want to see the ability to generate child links within the main nav tag. Being able to add a left nav comprised of child pages in the linked main nav section is very useful.

@stubear That’s definitely planned and often requested. Hopefully in the next version!

@stubear That’s definitely planned and often requested. Hopefully in the next version!

Next version (3.0) or next revision (2.1)?

@stubear 2.1 is a next version 😊