Selecting a CMS and MODx as strategic differentiator for our European company...#

My very first post on Modx forum concerns the still ongoing process to select a CMS for our company. We design small sailing boats and sell them all over Europe via a dealer channel. Each dealer obviously has it's own website with own look and feel. And we like to help them with all available information on our boats but displayed to their users in their own 'template'. And that all displayed in one of the more than 20 languages.

So there you go, the first major demands on our wish list for a CMS are:

1. use a template based on webuser profile (auto login from dealre's website) or maybe even based on originating URL
2. multiple languages (we expect over 100 pages per language)
3. strong separation content (plain HTML) x navigation structure (php) x templates (css)
4. Later the site would be extended with a booking service as dealers use our boat also to charter to guests

With these two in mind, plus the hidden desire to design a site with great graphics, we started out reviewing several Open source CMS systems. For a quick scan we relied on:

1 - http://www.opensourcecms.com and http://www.cmsmatrix.org
2 - the CMS home website - is it clear, organized?
3 - Google: how many hits, would give an indication on activity
4 - the forums...

Finally we downloaded Joomla, Drupal, Xaraya, CMS Made Simple and Modx. Installed them on our host ( NetworkSolutions ) .
Quick conclusions: - Joomla - good looking, great community but no logical structure, templates structure not clean
- Drupla - versatile but relies too much on people who make their living out of programming c.q. who thrive by complexity
- Xaraya - looked promising but...big...very big to upload and the user interface did not match our taste
- CMS Made Simple - liked it a lot, but seemed a little immature
- Modx - compact, clean (can't you join forces with CMS made simple?)

So, we started playing with Modx:
1 - manager user interface is good....although:
* it keeps re-building the page tree and that is painfully slow
* Menu items are very difficult to sort (what about http://demo.script.aculo.us/ajax/sortable_elements )?

2 - excellent separation of content x appearance
3 - oops - no multiple languages - a show stopper
* duplicating the page tree does not make sense: we have 100 pages x 20 languages ?
* So we tried to add a fields like content_nl, content_fr, content_de but stopped there as it did not seem wise to start interfering in the database without proper knowledge and some community feedback on how to do this
4 - oops - no template per user only per page - a show stopper
* simple field per (web)user would help specifying the preferred template. And the possibility to leave template field empty on a page so that Modx knows it should use the user defined setting. (A 'page template override switch' per user could help as well: 'Admin' would choose the current manager template, and it would enable us to give our site translators their own manager subset)

All in all, Modx is encouraging enough for us to spend this time writing this to you. Only if we would have multiple language instances for pages and user specific templates, we can start rolling!

Thanks for the patience for sticking with me in this long post,
Tom


PS. While playing we built a little structure and, shame on us, even modified DropMenu without knowing it is one of the core snippets (sorry): we added a parentClass for every <li> that has children so to allow a nice little arrow in a menu item that has children (inspired by http://www.nickrigby.com/examples/dropdown3/index.htm ). Well, maybe DropMenu could do that as it is, but the settings of DropMenu seemed so complex that it seemed easier to modify the code (although this was my first PHP program). Promise, I will not touch it again

MODx probably won't be the right solution for you for a few more months. If you can wait until then you'll get everything you wish and a heck of a lot more. If not, then Drupal may be the right choice for you now.

Thank you Ryan. We aim to go live around August, so I hope we can stick to Modx.

Tom

Quote from: Tom at May 09, 2006, 02:29 AM

So, we started playing with Modx: 1 - manager user interface is good....although:
* it keeps re-building the page tree and that is painfully slow
* Menu items are very difficult to sort (what about http://demo.script.aculo.us/ajax/sortable_elements )?
2 - excellent separation of content x appearance
3 - oops - no multiple languages - a show stopper
* duplicating the page tree does not make sense: we have 100 pages x 20 languages ?
* So we tried to add a fields like content_nl, content_fr, content_de but stopped there as it did not seem wise to start interfering in the database without proper knowledge and some community feedback on how to do this
4 - oops - no template per user only per page - a show stopper
* simple field per (web)user would help specifying the preferred template. And the possibility to leave template field empty on a page so that Modx knows it should use the user defined setting. (A 'page template override switch' per user could help as well: 'Admin' would choose the current manager template, and it would enable us to give our site translators their own manager subset)

All in all, Modx is encouraging enough for us to spend this time writing this to you. Only if we would have multiple language instances for pages and user specific templates, we can start rolling!

Thanks for the patience for sticking with me in this long post,
Tom

PS. While playing we built a little structure and, shame on us, even modified DropMenu without knowing it is one of the core snippets (sorry): we added a parentClass for every <li> that has children so to allow a nice little arrow in a menu item that has children (inspired by http://www.nickrigby.com/examples/dropdown3/index.htm ). Well, maybe DropMenu could do that as it is, but the settings of DropMenu seemed so complex that it seemed easier to modify the code (although this was my first PHP program). Promise, I will not touch it again

Tom, first, thanks for the detailed information about your review of MODx. Now let me address each of your points:

1) Manager interface is being redesigned for 1.0 release and 1.0 will get rid of the problematic and painfully slow refreshing of the tree, and there is already an Ajax page reordering tool being prepared to include in the upcoming 0.9.5 release.

2) Definitely one of the reasons I chose to get involved in this project.

3) 1.0 refactoring will introduce three concepts that will help with i18n and l10n, contexts (isolation of content into a section, subdomain, add-on domain, etc. within the same physical hosting space), cultures (all of the properties that help define presentation preferences for a specific culture, including language preference, date formatting, currency formatting, etc.), and content revisioning by culture (providing multiple versions of content to be presented to specific cultures when available, and providing rollback capabilities, and this includes being able to localize the main content of a page, a snippet, a chunk, a TV, etc.).

4) There are lots of approaches to this; and I think this can be easily accomplished with a plugin or snippets, depending on which approach better fits your full requirements.

P.S. The core snippets are provided so you can customize them, but duplicate them and rename them when modifying the core ones or you might overwrite your fancy customizations on the next upgrade that includes a DropMenu snippet
That said, I do not have a specific timeframe for release of 1.0, but I hope to have it into a usable form in the next 60 days.

Thanks for the reply, Jason. Enough encouragement to keep going. Seems that 1.0 and some snippet/plugin studying would bring us to where we want
Tom

And please, do share your modifications! We love variety

For sure we will do, Susan. Let us first get the bugs out and then we will post it on some proper place in the Forum
Tom

I use the ChangeTemplate plugin which allows you to append &tempate=n to any URL. This way you can dynamically change the template. So if you have distributor x then you can tell them to access marketing page for product y using: http://www.foo.com/index.php?id=a&template=b.

HTH

Andy

Excellent, Andy! Thanks, this is what we've been looking for
Tom

Dear Modx members,

As in the post of May this year, our company now commences a new CMS system. It will including reservation for hotels and boat as well as on line sales in several languages. We still favor Modx... however this weeks a little hesitant to continue. In May Jason / OpenGeek -from the core team I presume- mentioned a time frame for new features:

Quote from: OpenGeek at May 09, 2006, 09:54 AM

(...)

1) Manager interface is being redesigned for 1.0 release and 1.0 will get rid of the problematic and painfully slow refreshing of the tree, and there is already an Ajax page reordering tool being prepared to include in the upcoming 0.9.5 release.

(...)
That said, I do not have a specific timeframe for release of 1.0, but I hope to have it into a usable form in the next 60 days.

We are now a little concerned about the big time difference between the estimate and realisation of the new releases. We realize this is all volunteer work but that does not mean we should introduce too much time between an estimate and reality. Please give us some confidence.
In any case, if continuation is the right thing to do, we like to contribute to the Modx initiative. (www.weekendforsail.com for a very preliminary preview of what we am for.

Tom

Ps CMS Made Simple might be an alternative if needed. They have their v1.0 out this week. In addition, they are tempting us with a Hospitality Reservation module. Does anybody have some comparision info with Modx about it's CMS capabilities?