modx Capabilities

I havent downloaded the framework yet, but I’m wondering about the capabilities of modx.

Just trying to figure out what default capabilities are included, and what I would need to code in myself - Here’s an example.

Say, for instance, that I wanted to create a section of my site that worked kinda like Sourceforge - or just a basic user submitted downloads module, whene there’s a link to the downloads section from the navbar, categories split up into download type (Games, Engines, Tutorials, etc), then more sub-categories, like Beginner Engines, Intermediate, etc, and so on. Maybe going up to 5 subcategory levels, then have a age with information about the file, as well as user submitted screenshots, reviews, and more. All of this with users integrated from SMF forums.

Is the framework flexible enough to create this as-is, or would I need to modify or add to the source?

It can handle this but not out of the box. For the situation you described I would recommend a script that is specific for this purpose. But if you want to roll up your sleeves and build this in MODx it can be done with a combination of existing resources and some custom modifications or coding.

Just trying to compare ModX to Symphony project... I’m a developer by trade but have a project that can likely be built on a variety of frameworks - but building it from scratch would be too expensive for the client.

Exactly how would this be accomplished in modx?

ModX and Symphony are at different ends of the framework spectrum. Where symphony is a full blow application framework and MODx is a CMS framework.

For the SMF integration there are a few SMF bridge plugins but I am not sure how solid or up-to-date they are.

The easy way to do this is to setup the document tree (modx site structure) with a downloads section and create the subsections for each top level ’type’:

- Downloads
--- Games
--- Engines
--- Tutorials
--- Etc..

Then for the additional classifications you can use tags (actually you can use tags for all the classifications, but it might be easier to manages with top level bins).

The biggest challenge will be the submission process. There are a few snippets that provide a method of submitting content directly into the modx document system. The method that will give you the mods flexibility will be FDM (it is in perpetual beta but is a solid solution). However, since you code, I would recommend just doing a custom submission form (use the docApi class to easily add pages). By using the MODx document system you will be able to use standard modx resources for searching and indexing.