I need some advice

I’m currently working on setting up a personal website which I want to use for posting BSD, Linux, OSX, Scripting, etc. related stuff that I come by during work or hobby projects (like how to setup servers and such for a specific goal). But even though it’s for personal use I want visitors to have the ability to post comments to the content on the website + have the ability to promote members to actually add content themselves. (though unlike a wiki everyone will manage their own content)

Currently I have Wordpress + MyBB installed but due to the bridge plugin between Wordpress and MyBB not working it kinda comes down to a blog site where I have to put all the content in blog posts for it to work properly + have a separate forum. The bridge software would allow for each post to automatically be posted on the MyBB forum so that all the comments would be done via the forum. (but that doesn’t seem to work)

So since that didn’t work I decided to go back to the beginning and write down my wishes and make a decision based on what I actually want. (or something like that)

Here are a few requirements I wrote down.

Users & Groups:

Everyone has to login / register for comments and such, promotion will be needed to add content.

Content:

News / Blog content with the option to have comments. (strictly by members) This will be the place for posting site news, tips, basically the things I come up with that fit in a short post.

Big pages / articles, no idea what to name them. But I guess this would be best compared to a big Wiki page with headings, documentation, loads of info, etc. Roughly a place for me to put personal projects. (and i.m.h.o. this won’t fit / belong in a blog post, technically it would though)

Static pages with the usual. (links, about, etc.)

Extra features:

Table of Content generator for the "big pages" would be nice. Basically a script that e.g. shows all the H1 t/m H4 tags in a nice list.

Tags and/or categories. For easily grouping types of content together and for search purposes.

Forums, probably for the future will depend on the amount of members.

The advice part:

As I mentioned I’m currently running Wordpress + MyBB in a test setup, you can have a look:

• http://pleh.info
• http://forums.pleh.info

The theme is something that I also have in a proper template, so it can be converted to roughly any system. Just takes some effort. (I’m happy with the theme none the less) But that’s obviously not my problem, it’s the software running the site. Wordpress comes with some nice features but when you check the above list then the part for big pages separate from the blog / news isn’t really doable in a nice way with Wordpress.

So after some searching I came to modx. Well, again since I kinda started with modx back in February ( http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,46105.0.html ) with questions about the table of content part (which was nicely answered). This brings me to wayfinder which allows me to make normal static pages which can be categorized in a hierarchy setup.

Right now I’m already leaning towards modx (evo, will run revo when it gets GA status) but I’m wondering if I could get some additional advice from the people here based on the requirements I’ve written. (and just to get it out of the way, I’m not very fond of Wiki software ^_~)

Thanks in advance.

Reading my post again I kinda understand why nobody replies lol, sorry for the wall of text haha I tend to over think everything trying to make a solid decision etc. etc. but in this case I kinda already made up my mind which can be read in the earlier post. So any reply would range from, "modx can do that" or "just get going already"

So I’m going to do just that ^_~

Will take some effort but I saw some links to bobs guides so I think I’ll manage. I’ll just have to learn the system when it comes to templating, converting the template on pleh.info towards pleh.info/modx will take most of my time I guess. For the other stuff that I want on the site I did some searching and found the tooling needed for that:

• Ditto + Jot for news & comments. (from what I’ve read those are the ones I should use)
• Wayfinder for creating a nice Sitemap. I want to create a main resource called Categories, and under that resource a few resources like BSD, Linux, Scripting, etc. and under those the actual pages. (e.g. Categories --> Linux --> Kickstart with CentOS)
• And on those larger static pages I’ll use Page TOC Generator for getting a nice Table of Content. I just hope it still works Otherwise I’ll see if I can make this one, I’m not an expert coder but a php script searching for h1 / h2 / etc. tags shouldn’t be too hard.
• Forums: In good time I guess, and by that time I’ll probably be running modx revo + the discuss plugin might even be out of beta by then. And if that isn’t the case I could always just install MyBB on a subdomain as I have it now. But for now, it’s too early to add a forum.

Other then that I have no clue to what extra’s I would need on a modx installation, but I’ll just add things as I go.

For those that read this far, thanks for reading. I’m off to just go and make my first modx site

Greetz,

Mejiro

Yes, unfortunately what you’re asking is a little too vast to be explained in a single forum post!

Try SMF Forum Integration for forum - you may be able to import your MyBB forum into SMF: http://modxcms.com/extras/package/419

For tagging your news and blogs use taglinks or tagcloud extras. There’s also some guides in the forums to integrating WordPress into MODx.

My only advice would be, if you’ve got the time, to visit the extras section and browse all the extras as you’ll discover things there you may not have thought of, or that you’re looking for.

Luckily my site is still empty content wise, same goes for the forum. I’m currently more in the process of setting it all up.

When it comes to the forums, I’ll probably put that idea to the side for a while. I have absolutely no visitors atm, safe from a few that might have clicked the link in this post. So adding a forum is going to be a new challenge for another time ^_~

So right now I’m just going to keep my focus on MODx and building up the actual site.

While playing around with MODx I saw that you can easily add tags to blog / news posts + each page on the site can have the same tags. That seemed to work nicely with the search function. And I can create categories by defining resources in the manager. I’ve also found that plugin you suggested for the tagcloud ( http://modxcms.com/extras/package/446 ), that’s going to be a nice addition

I will also browse the extra’s a bit more thoroughly, I have plenty of time since this is a hobby project.

Small update.

I’m currently trying out the MyBB Bolt-on extension for MODx.

• Plugin page: http://modxcms.com/extras/package/310
• Support thread: http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,10376.0.html
• Installation instructions: http://www.acronymity.co.uk/projects/mybb_bolt_on/instructions.html

Things that are working for me that are required:

• News Headlines - Gets a specified number of topics from a specified forum, of which the first posts in each topic are parsed and displayed along with a lot of other useful information.
• Latest Topics - Displays the last X topic titles and post dates in a list.
• Latest Events - Displays the next X forum calendar events in a list. (sadly this function gives me a mysql error, but hopefully I can fix it)

I have it setup on a testpage, http://pleh.info/modx/.

So far this plugin seems to work pretty nicely, it would allow me to do all the news posting via the forums + comments as well and allow me to have a select amount of manager users on the MODx installation which will be for posting content to the site. The way this works I won’t need any integration of the actual users since they will be doing all the replying via the MyBB forums.

Other then that things are getting along pretty well, getting the hang of wayfinder, chunks and snippets + the templating seems to be pretty easy indeed. (thanks Bob, great guide).

Right, I’m off to do some more testing and hopefully I can get the events part of the MyBB bolt-on to work as well since it would be a nice addition as well for the site.