MODx Layout and Design DIscussion/Feedback

Hello,

This is part question and part discussion from those more familiar with CMS management and MODx experience. (Hopefully I am posting this in the correct forum)

A little background to my question/discussion:
I have a little website for a hobby project of mine. Currently, I set it up with Joomla 1.5, having compared it to Drupal and a couple others and finding it easiest to use. I mainly have a blog and some article postings and link it to an external wiki and forum systems (I’m okay without a bridge since the CMS part requires no logging in by users). While I like many aspects of Joomla, one thing that I am running up against is that if you want to customize modules and pages, it becomes very near impossible. I then went looking for other CMSs and came across this one and, after some learning curve, have began to really like it and am working on moving my site over to it.

And now to my question....
One thing that drew me to Joomla was its Article Manager and way of separating articles/content from the layout. MODx doesn’t seem to have this built-in as you just have a tree of ’pages’, some are dynamically updated from other pages while others just hold content. This feels a bit weird and messy to me.

I was thinking of using the tree and dividing it between Content pages and Layout pages, something like:

... and then, obviously, filling in the Layout pages with the appropriate Content via Ditto or whatever chunks/snippets. (Ie, Wayfinder would pout to the Layout.id instead of 0, etc).

I was wondering, for people with more experience, do you do something similar? Do you just stick with a mixed structure? What are the pros/cons and what systems do people find helpful for layout out your site on the back-end?

Thanks for your feedback!

I, and I think many others do pretty much as you have suggested, according to the complexity of the site.
Create containers for different sections/elements of the site.
It keeps it neat and tidy, some of the containers hardly ever get opened whereas others are in a state of continual updating.
You can then restrict who has access to them if you have other admins managing the site.
It’s completely up to you how it’s organised.
If you change your mind later, you can move docs from one container to another.

I go fo a straight forward approach where the doc tree reflects the site structure as closely as possible:

+ Home
+ About
+ Blog
- article
- article
- ...
+ News
- article
- article
- article
+ Contact
+ 404 Error page
+ Rss Feed

This will change to accommodate special situations, but overall this is what I go for. This seems to work well for some sites or sites with fewer sections, however, for sites with many sections it may be easier to do as you suggest.

I would agree with dev_cw here. When it comes to editing or handing over a site to a new "webmaster" then having the tree structure follow the structure of the site is very helpful. It just seems to make more sense and everything can be found following the navigation of the site. I guess it depends on the complexity, but even most large sites with many different directories can follow this same logic. FWIW, I am currently finishing up a site that already has almost 900+ pages of content and the site structure is working great.

I can see how it would be easier to make your way through at first but doesn’t that go against the basic design principle of separating content from presentation?

The document tree is content. Presentation is handled by the template system. Sounds like you’re confusing organization with presentation.

Very well put Susan. Thanks for clarifying.

Quote from: sottwell at Jun 18, 2008, 04:52 PM

The document tree is content. Presentation is handled by the template system. Sounds like you’re confusing organization with presentation.

Sounds like I am. So does it make sense to change the wording? What about mixing content and organization?

Timmer, That’s what I thought you were getting at.

Quote from: Timmer at Jun 18, 2008, 05:48 PM

Quote from: sottwell at Jun 18, 2008, 04:52 PM

The document tree is content. Presentation is handled by the template system. Sounds like you’re confusing organization with presentation.

Sounds like I am. So does it make sense to change the wording? What about mixing content and organization?

I think you are confusing a lot of ideas here. When content, presentation, and behavior are discussed in software development, it is most often in the context of MVC (Model, View, Controller), where the "Model" parts of the application manage and represent data (for instance database abstraction), the View is the presentation. This could mean your html template and CSS, or any aspect a user interacts with, like a form and how it is laid out. The Controller is the part of the application that takes input from the view (http requests, clicks, submissions) and interprets what action to take and which Model(s) to request data from, and the other way, takes data from the Model and hands it to the View for rendering.

Orgainization, directory structure, and document hierarchy are for the most part unrelated to presentation and/or content.

If I am following correctly, it sounds like you got used to the way it was done in Joomla and you have noticed that MODx is different. You are correct. MODx does display content differently in that it is much more flexible than Joomla. You can make much more than just news articles, pages, and blog entries.

Most of us who use MODx on a regular basis will be happy to tell you that we think the document hierarchy as a tree is a better system, but that comes down to our opinion. It is a bit of a mental leap to get over, but I am sure that once you do, it will give you a whole new perspective on how flexible this system really is.

I say this as a compliment to MODx... It is not Joomla!

-sD-
Dr. Scotty Delicious, DFPA.