MODx v other frameworks

Hey all

Ok, I may not endear myself to one or two folks here but my CMS of choice at the moment is Joomla, and honestly, I find it a truly supreme piece of kit . Anyway, I am very conscious of the old addage involving eggs and a basket so I have been on the search for another framework or two. I have tried Drupal, CMS Made Simple, Xoops, e107 and maybe one or two others. These to a large extent have been fine but in every case I have found that I have been able to implement comparative tasks easier in Joomla.

Yesterday, I was having anread through the comments posted on opsourcecms.com and saw some postive feedback on MODx while reviewing another CMS. I had never heard about this CMS platform before and decided to visit its demo page to browse through the reviews. Apart from one user who reported a security exploit, the reviews were mostly favourable. This certainly got me more insterested and I headed over to cmsmatrix.org for a feature set review. I was indeed impressed with what was on offer and felt that I will definitely give MODx a spin.

You may have noticed that I have been to two "independent" sites before heading here. This was no accident. The idea was to gauge the viewpoint of others before getting the vibes from the home team . While I welcome balanced reviews, I am really looking forward to receiving comments such as why you think that MODx wipes the floor with other portals or how it eats them for lunch . I shall be grateful also for links pointing to reviews and other MoDx resources.

Thanks in advance for your submissions

Regards

While MODx does Windows just fine, it doesn’t do floors

Anyway, it’s a matter of choice. We like it, but are certainly not fanatical about it. I’m a mid-range code tweaker and hacker, and love MODx for its (relatively) clean core structure, and the core interfaces that have been added to it to make it easier and easier to customize without modifying the core; although I’m certainly not shy about modifying core files if I think of something interesting!

I also like the simple and obvious way the structure of a site is directed by the virtual structure of the Manager’s document tree. And I especially like the simple and obvious template system. I’ve ported dozens of templates and have a whole folder full of web pages and free templates to be ported on my desktop to work on in my spare time; it’s fun!

Now the new alpha version (aka Revolution) is another animal altogether, with lots of OOP and xPDO and ORM and other alphabet soup goodness, but as I said, I’m a mid-level hacker and it’s heavy going for me. We’ve got really good people working on it, though, who really understand this stuff, and in some cases invented it. The external management is still much the same, however; especially the HTML page template system is not changed. I hope in time to come to understand it as well as I do the legacy system, and be able to contribute useful goodies to it as well.

If you want complete customization without any restrictions MODx is what you will want. MODx really let’s you use your own imagination. Same things can be archieved in many ways. And because of that working with MODx is fun and rewarding.

Other great features are straight-forward menu structure, easy templating, front-end editing (QuickEdit) and especially template variables. Template variables could be described something like "custom content fields". Template variables truly are indispensable once you get used to them.

But if you want something half-baked... portal-in-a-box, typical blog site or something else easy and fast, no customization needed, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend MODx as first choise.

Here’s my 2 cents:

I come from a joomla background myself, like so many other people here. I don’t know why some people think that joomla is a good for designers; it’s not - just understanding the templating system is a nightmare! Anyway, we ain’t talking about joomla here - we’re talking about modx .

To add on to what has been said above, If you want killer designs, with no restrictions on the look of your templates, then modx is for you. If you can get around your CSS and HTML, that’s even much better. If you want to take it a notch higher and are willing to learn at least some basic PHP, then you’ll really experience the power of this beast. Mind you, even without knowing some PHP (I don’t know nada - I have only just started learning it - thx to modx:)) modx is still awesome! Give it a whirl, you won’t regret it!

/k

Fantastic! Now that’s what CMSs should be about - SIMPLE customisation, menuing, templating, extensible, core structure understanding and modification ... and all of the neat stuff you guys pointed out. I’ll go one further and say that the community seems amazing too . Really friendly and honest answers . I will definitely be MODxing away .

Cheers Lads/Ladettes

I also came from a Mambo/Joomla background. The best thing is Template Variables (check my signature for what these are). TV’s give you an unlimited number of inputs per page. No more showing the client how to copy-paste a table in their WYSIWYG because all they have it Title,Alias,Content 1, and Content2.

Another thing I like is everything can be a document. You dont need to create a component or module to have new input fields and a different layout. You just create a new template with the specific TV’s you need and tada!

TV’s can be blank text boxes or can also be scripted (to be a drop-down of files in a folder or a list of documents as checkboxes).

modx gives you the ability to make content management easy and customized for your client.

Check out
- Ditto
- AjaxSearch
- ManagerManager

Wow that’s some suberb flexibility , thanks for all of the useful information.

Cheers

I`m so glad I found modx, because working with joomla or mambo was a nightmare I can spot a site done with joomla/mambo from a mile away because they all look the same, sites done with modx don’t suffer from the clone effect.

For reviews (there’s a couple of sites - some old, some not so old) just type this into google: modx reviews

If you wanna dig into some lightweight but useful tutorials for beginners (am not rushing you...just anticipating your next move ) check this:

http://bobsguides.com/MODx.html - this is where I started and this is useful too: http://www.sottwell.com/modx-from-the-inside.html

You can have a peek at the wiki too

http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/Main_Page and of course the main documentation too

cheers/k

Quote from: kongondo at Sep 15, 2008, 09:53 AM

If you wanna dig into some lightweight but useful tutorials for beginners (am not rushing you...just anticipating your next move ) check this:

Nice one kongondo m8, don’t worry about not rushing me, I am on the ball already and can’t wait to get stuck in even further . Thanks for the links.

Cheers