modX for Catalog site

Can someone point me in the right direction? I’m toying with using modX for a product catalog...catalog is contained in a mySQL database, with some 50,000 records. Is there a built-in component for modX that would allow me to build a search based on user input, return the results, and format them?

I’ve looked into using the DataGrid with bindings, but support for that seems hard to come by, and I haven’t seen any live examples.

What benefit would building this site with modX offer, over simply building the page with Dreamweaver and PHP?

Thanks in advance.

• See #2 --> http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,36714.0.html
• eform2db and custom snippet: http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/DB_query_and_Placeholders
• xPDO! http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/board,219.0.html / http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,22156.0.html

And... -> makeUrl
http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php?title=API:makeUrl
http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php?topic=5309.0
http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,36096.msg218511.html#msg218511

Cool, looks like there are several options...any idea which is the simplest and the speediest for a large data set? xPDO is certainly interesting...

For some inspiration...

• http://www.npg.org.uk/
  http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,32165.0.html
  

  In response to some questions there are around 3200 modx pages and a couple of extra databases. The collections database holds 120,000 works and 45,000 sitters and artists, these are served through 7 main pages included by the modx front end. There is also a shop products database.

• http://www.smarthistory.org/
  http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,34964.0.html

mrhaw, thanks so much for these leads!