so i got my first modx site up

after looking through a range of hosting options i decided on media temple (http://www.mediatemple.net), mostly because the ’grid’ hosting sounds promising (even if the descriptions were somewhat vague). unfortunately they only offer mysql 4, but i really don’t know how much that actually matters. so far the web based controls look slick and clean, and seem to be an adequate alternative to the webhost manager/cpanel combo i’m used to at hostgator, and it’s definitely a lot less convoluted than the dreamhost web management options.

so without further ado: http://www.lahjik.com/

i realize it’s a bit lacking as far as features go, but for now i want it to be simple. i have a good bit of experience working with drupal, but it seems pretty resource heavy for the types of sites i’d like to design, and modx really seems to have a community that feels more concise, so hopefully i can get some good experience with it to determine if i can make an entire leap.

perhaps some enterprising forum trolls can give me some hints on direction in template creation. i’d really like to emulate the functionality of drupal blocks so i can control what ’chunks’ display on which pages, but i’m kind of zoned out right now and ready for bed.

http://modxcms.com/documentation.html

thanks. i’m familiar with the documentation (i used it in creating my template and various chunk/snippet related things), but sometimes people like to ramble about the things they know, and i find context and discussion are often great catalysts for learning.

That’s what Template Variables are for. You can either create a TV with a textarea for a whole section, then edit it on each page to contain your blocks (these would be in chunks), or you could make a select drop-down or a checkbox block with pre-assigned chunks; in which you you’d only need to select which blocks you wanted in that section. The disadvantage to the latter is that there is no way to order the blocks; they will appear on the page in the order they are set in the Option Values field of the TV.

You can also use the @INHERIT default value, so you’d only need to edit it on the parent/container/folder document for all of its children to inherit that value.