MODx is very complicated compared..

Hi, I read the benefits of MODx as being easy to learn hard to master.

It seems Joomla was easier to navigate lol. I’ve installed MODx and I’m now left with a 40 page website and over hundred different settings that appear to do nothing.

Can someone please point me in the right direction?

I want a basic static HTML appearing site with a few article pages here and there with a nav bar on the left and I’d like to add an opt-in box on the right but the chunk manager has a learning curve

I read that I can have HTML pages all working from the same basic template (nav bar left, opt-in right) and the ability to edit the content/articles as I build new pages.

As you can see, to many solutions have caused me to go blank.

Louis

Take a look at the site in my sig., especially the intro section and the "porting your site to MODx" section -- also the section on chunks.
The MODx Wiki is also a good resource: especially the links here: http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/Category:Beginners

After you have a basic idea of how MODx works, the sample web site (which it sounds like you chose to install) will make more sense to you. Some of the things you want to do are in the sample web site.

When you create your own web site, you’ll probably want to start over from scratch but keep the sample web site around somewhere to refer to for how to do things.

What you want to do sounds fairly simple and I think you’ll like MODx a lot once you get your head around how it does things. It will probably go faster than you think and you’ll have a lot more flexibility than you would in Joomla. People on the forum here are really helpful but they really need much more specific questions to work with, so try to do one thing at a time and ask specific questions about how to do it.

Welcome to MODx.

Can I just add my comments being someone who 3 months ago had never used modx. I started using modx to create a new site from scratch I found it took me a week to get the basics of the site online,(Having already gone through the whole design process creating layouts, and finding my friends requirements) the actual process of coding the site and getting it on line took a week using modx.  Now this was basic site mainly static with just section where my friend adds posts. sounds like yours.

Since then I have moved all 8 of the other sites I have designed for other friends over to modx these range from everything from the above to quite complex sites where the user wished to be able to add edit and remove pages all over the place almost constantly, to blogging sites.

And I am in no way a pro developer, I teach ICT in a small local school. And yes the schools site is on MODX and we are currently working on a section for the kids to be able to control and update.

So what I am saying is it can be done. If I can be of help from my experiances over the last 3 months then please post specific questions and I am willing to help just like the other people in these forums who have helped me over the last 3 months.

Yep, MODx is very complicated compared to Joomla.

Joomla: it does everything for you, therefore it’s inflexible.
Example: One must create a section. One must create a category. Content can only belong to a category and section. One must build the menu. One must trial and error their way through the menu parameters to get it to display how you want it, only to find that Joomla uses 100% width tables to display your content. Thus Joomla is ultimately restrictive and inflexible.

MODx: you figure out what you want it to do, therefore extremely flexible.
Example: In place of the Section » Category » content hierarchy + that damned menu builder of Joomla, use Ditto and then use a tpl (template) chunk to format how you want it to look.

My blog Ditto looks like this:


the tpl chunk is:


Click on the links for my blog: http://peter.bockenthien.org/blog.html and you get a clean, table-less HTML code, whereas Joomla would render it like this:


So, in a nutshell, you control what the output is going to be in MODx using as many TPLs (chunks) as you wish however you want. You can be as creative or as boring as you want. You are not restricted in any way. In fact, one could easily have a chunk that looks like Joomla:


It took me me about 6 months to unlearn 4+ years of Mambo/Joomla. I’ll never go back. I’ll never create, webmaster a Joomla site nor train someone how to do so because it’s a big waste of time. Who’s got time to waste?

Sorry to rant.

BobRay’s site is a great place to start and refer to.

Welcome to MODx,
Peter
Meristem Design Inc.

(by the way, I love taking rockettheme joomla templates and converting them to MODx. It’s a lot of work but I find so much satisfaction in recreating them into tableless designs.)

Meristem: that is a great passionate rant. Well said Something about comparing modx to Joomla that stir up some emotions.

Thanks, I hope they’re positive emotions directed towards me.

I was sitting at a meeting last week with a potential client and their existing tech guys (not web guys) who had a Mambo site that they were proud of. After wading through the back end of Mambo, the potential client was thrilled by the "all there" look of the MODx back end, asked me how long it would take to convert the site from Mambo to MODx.

A few days, I said, and the tech guy just went off on me, saying I was naive, overly optimistic and other geek putdowns. I wasn’t insulted at all. I just put it right back on them: I’ve been where you are right now, to pour a ton of time into learning Mambo/Joomla only to find out that it has boxed you in and can never be flexible enough to meet the demands of a client. So from your perspective, yeah, you’re absolutely right, but having converted 10+ Joomla sites to MODx, I’m actually not being optimstic at all. If your client really wanted it done by tomorrow morning, I would do it and not stress out whether it would break or not.

Then the tech guy ranted: Mambo, Joomla and Drupal have HUGE communities, millions! Big! They are the big 3!! MODx is tiny. Small. Very small community. And it is a fork! A fork of etomite! Forks are very bad! That’s why we use Mambo! You convert this site to MODx and you will blow it up! Boom!

We just kind of looked at him like, WTF!?? The MODx community is small indeed but I find it super responsive to my thick head. I don’t think MODx will ever be popular among the masses who need a CMS with very little beyond content management, but I think for those of us who aspire to break out of the box, MODx will rock. Now if I can just figure out MODx 2....

Probably the single biggest reason we embarked on the journey that turned into the modx project over 4 years ago now was that at the time there was no drop-dead simple way to create a site that had zero restrictions and that imposed nothing on the site output—basically 100% semantic XHTML/CSS sites that embraced web standards and that performed well in Google. We wanted absolute visual freedom and a way to build brochureware sites fast. Those other systems mentioned in this thread are probably the single-biggest reason we finally gave up and pushed forward on our own.

As far as being a fork, well we didn’t really have any other option other than abandoning the 1000+ hours that had gone into the modx-bits at that time. Honestly, we would have gladly devoted all of our energy into Eto, but I think in retrospect that what happened was a big blessing in disguise. When we woke up to seeing all the posts about the web users add on and document variables (now TVs) mash up having mysteriously disappeared over night, we started regrouping to build our own community. Eto to this day is still a great project and the new project leaders have stayed true to their roots of being a super-simple system for building basic marketing websites. modx has become more complex to fit our own needs, but also much more capable and flexible.

You’ll always have tradeoffs when choosing a web platform, and modx is certainly not the right system for all people. Here’s our general guiding philosophy: don’t do it the same way simply because everyone else does. We focus on flexibility and freedom, not feature-checkboxes (and certainly not boxes, columns or blocks that you’re required to place your content into!). We also mandate extendability, so you can do things in modx that may be cumbersome or even impossible in other systems.

That means it often takes a while to unlearn some ingrained habits before modx clicks. It also offers multiple ways to accomplish your goals, be they simple menu building tasks or complex web services integrations. Sure, there’s best practices that have emerged to do things, but there’s no "one way".

Equally important, we love and listen to our community, while also encouraging, soliciting and welcoming everyone’s involvement, no matter how "experienced" they are. Great ideas don’t always have to come from the smartest or most-expreienced folks in the room, and still to this day I am impressed by the creative and inventive ways people use modx. When the folks that created the software learn from the community something right has to be going on! (And thanks to everyone in the community; you guys and gals make it a privilege and fun project on which we continue working and dedicating our professional lives). I could go on and on, but that’d just get boring ...

In closing, the story above really has me smiling. Why? Just like we’ve done for the past four years, we’ll continue to nod our heads in understanding of their feelings and justification for their decision, congratulate them on their success, and continue to methodically grow our global communities while make modx an even better platform for building sites and custom apps. See you in another four years.

What a great response to my ugly thread starter

I hope you’ve all seen the positive negative in my rant.. "Oh, I can’t carry all of this money".

Thanks for the help, I’ll be sure to learn from the ground up.
Any recommendations for a basic theme/template I can
use to build up using CSS and Chunks? Here’s my
requirements:

• Nav bar on the left
• Header/Footer Image space
• Content area in the middle
• Optin box on the right
• Comment option at the bottom

As stated I can add or take away from the template but some
help getting close to that layout would be very much
appreciated.

Thank you so much,
Louis

Louis,

Did you install the sample data when you installed MODx?

Peter

Yes, thinking i Could base my site from it but it seems to have taken over