Choosing between TYPO3 and MODx, and other questions about MODx

Hi all.

I’m Roberto, and I work for a company that needs a CMS with some specific requirements. We, that will handle the site and its needs, are a small group of web developers, 6-7 members, with specific capabilities per person. For example, there is a graphic creator, 2-3 coders (included me), and the others caring about the contents.

Now, I get involved in this work later than the other. They listed some OpenSource CMS, but unfortunately MODx wasn’t in this list, and they choosed TYPO3 because of its power and its functionalities that seems to fit quite well what we need.

Now, TYPO3 is quite difficult to learn, especially for the TypoScript, a declarative language with the goal to create 100% customizable templates, that TYPO3 developers have created.

A person who used TYPO3 for creating a couple of sites, told us what I have already found on the web, in particular the learning time for TypoScript is very high. So high that he told us that he had payed a professional group that only create templates for TypoScript!

As soon as I came to know this, I’ve started searching for other solutions, and I came across MODx. It seems like MODx fits our needs too, but I need to know some things that I hadn’t found searching this forum, the website and other blogs and other sites on MODx.

We have a quite big site, I think hundred of pages, we will surely need a newsletter, the possibilities to create groups of "managers" that will modify only their pages, we will need multilangual site, and, for the future, both multisite needs, searching needs among our sites and visibility in searching engines.

Well. Let’s see. For the newsletter, I think there are snippets that serves us quite well. Creating groups is possible, so that won’t be a problem.

Now let’s go into what I didn’t found. How’s the multilanguage support going? Consider that we’ll have an Italian/English switching link on every page.
How can I realize this?
What about multisite support? How can I have one backend for N sites? Will I need more databases or not?
The search is a bad issues, too. We are developing an incredible efficient search with AquaBrowser. It is at an advanced level of develop, so we can’t go back. How can I integrate AquaBrowser search in MODx? Consider that AquaBrowser interfaces with TYPO3, for what I know. For visibility in searching engines and accessibilty needs I read that there aren’t problems.

Woah, huge post. Well, no more things come to my mind, so that’s all for now.

Sorry for my imperfect english, but I’m italian

Thanks to all,

Roberto

There are several methods for handling multiple languages. There is a wiki post that has a page-by-page language switcher: http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/Make_Multi_Lingual_Site

Multiple sites will be easy with the next modx generation Revolution, it is still in alpha so will be available for future requirements. There was a recent post on a method for doing this with 0963 that looks interesting: http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,34536.0.html

If the search is a database search hen it is no problem as long as all sites are using the same db.

Hi dev_cw, thanks for your answer.

But now I’ve got some more

1) We’ve got to be ready with the site around september/october. Do you know when the stable release of Revolution will be out?
2) The search is not among a database, or at least not only one. I don’t know very well this issue because I’m not the developer of that project. But it’s something like this: we have a huge (and I mean huge ) catalogue of things, and a search will generate a list of links ordered by matching/relevance. Plus the user has got some options, to tune his research. So I think it’s not a DB search.

Thanks again!

1) We’ve got to be ready with the site around september/october. Do you know when the stable release of Revolution will be out?

I hope so, but there is no guarantee

2) The search is not among a database, or at least not only one. I don’t know very well this issue because I’m not the developer of that project. But it’s something like this: we have a huge (and I mean huge Tongue) catalogue of things, and a search will generate a list of links ordered by matching/relevance. Plus the user has got some options, to tune his research. So I think it’s not a DB search.

This is boyond my scope of experience. However, in general terms if it works outside MODx then it can work inside MODx. Therefore if you have a working solution then chances are it can be adapted to work within the modx environment.

As for the catalog search you definitely want to check out tvExplorer (not sure this thread is the latest though, as Heliotrope). That’s what Heliotrope and Perrine used to create the advanced search for deco-in.com (check this url : http://www.deco-in.com/recherche-avancee.html it’s in french but you should get the idea).

Ok, it’s enough for now.

Monday we’ll decide about going on with TYPO3 or switching to MODx (and I obviously hope the latter one will be chosen ).

Anyway, I have to create a site for a university exam, and I’ll surely use MODx

Thanks to all!

Hi ganeshXL.

I really don’t know where things are stored. I think they’re in a half dozen of databases, but I’m not sure. And I don’t know which kind of pages they are, but I think both statics and dinamics ones, documents, images, everything.

We don’t plan to import everything into the CMS, I heard of using an IFrame, but this will depend on how much we are satisfied with the CMS we’ll use.

I’ll give you a link to this to get an idea.

http://colombo.imss.fi.it/IMSS/?uilang=en

Thanks!

In that statement I was talking about pages generated by the CMS, not the actual state of things of our site
I mean, if you create a template in xhtml/css that validates, it will validate also when you put it into MODx, and for visibility there are meta tags

Btw, thanks for the answer!

Hi, just posting to inform you that we decided to try do use MODx for 1-2 weeks, build our site in this time and see how much does it take and whatever it comes out using MODx.

Bye!

Its great to hear you about choosing MODx instead of Typo3. I have had the same doubts too but MODx is a really great options. In my opinion, Typo3 can be a large and consistent project but it takes a lot of issues "from the past". The learning curve and the closed language ( typoscript ) is a problem too. MODx is simple and powerfull. In a future we’ll see some new features like improved caching system, internationalization.
I hope versioning will be near too.
Tell us how has been your experience with modx when you have news