Thanks guys, that’s pretty much the response I was expecting and I agree with you all.
With regards to the large CSS file:
I beg to differ. More lines don’t equal quality, or any kind of understanding what websites are meant to be. Try to add all of those custom classes in the tinyMCE editor and your client will go nuts scrolling down the endless list of options.
That was kind of my point, we have coded it well and we can’t get it smaller than 5000 lines - a demonstration again of just how many inconsistencies we’re having to code in order to acheive the design.
In terms of chunks, yes we are using {{head}}, {{navigation}} etc whenever we can. In fact there’s 132 chunks!... We’re also making pretty extensive use of PHx. Like I said before, the templates are just so strikingly different page to page, those chunks are never outputted in the same positions and so while we do reuse the chunks within each template, they must be organised differently for each of the templates. To give you an idea - we have different article folders, and each folder has an archive view to display all articles within that folder - however - the archives are designing massively different from folder to folder, down to the rowTpl level. Another example - we have a login area for users, sometimes it’s in the left column, on other pages it’s in the right column, and on others - inside the main content column... nightmare, and inconsistent...
In our experience with MODX and indeed any CMS, we cannot trust a client (especially this one) to stick well to formatting rules even with TinyMCE - they do everything you tell them not to do and then freak out when something breaks (pasting from MSWord for example). Instead we’ve been using PHx to strip tags other than ’img’, ’p’ or ’br’ from the document content TV. This means that anything that is layout related is inside the template, so that there is no chance that the client can break the flow or stlye of the page. No doubt this is another one of the reasons it may seem like we’re using too many templates.
No doubt we (developers) could have cut down on many things with a little more planning before starting the build of our site (definitely with the CSS file!), but the point of my posting to these forums is to build a case to present to my designers on how NOT to design so as to make things more reusable across the site. As I mentioned previously, we’ve done many MODx sites and this is the first one that has ended in a state like this, recently we did a site with over 100k articles (dating back to 1946 for a small news publication) using 15 templates. FYI we achevied the 100k articles by using a seperate content table as the editors had no need to ever re-edit a majority of their content as it was so old, so it didn’t need to actually be a MODx doc.
Thanks again for feedback.
MODX Staff
MODX Staff
