Really want to like MODX

This is gonna be kinda random... bear with me...

Having come from Joomla, there are certainly a lot of things to like about Modx, especially the flexibilty and the ease and porting a template over (I did it in about 5 minutes).

But the one thing I liked about Joomla is having a ba-jillion plugins (almost too many) to do literally everything, so that when building a site I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. I see the snippets and the add-ons and am wondering if I can easily get the same functionality with Modx. I know enough php to get by... should I bulk up on my PHP or just move back to Joomla (UGGH)?

Also, newbie question here. I hear people talking about SVN’s of the Revolution build. Not knowing what SVN’s are, how do I implement them on my sites? Or is it a local only thing?

I’m desperate to get this to work, simply because it appears to have the most potential of all the CMS’s.

Thanks for your help!

Chris

Chris,

there may not be a ba jilllion plugins, but there are certainly more than most people could ever use.

All of the obvious and standard needs are covered, plus others which are just downright cool.

Have a look in the Repository for more info on "plugins"/snippets.

Chris, I tried out a lot of CMS’s before arriving at MODx. A lot of them have more 3rd party plugins and a lot of them have (arguably) a more mature/polished UI. But none of them made as much sense to me as MODx, and none of them were as easy to customize. The downside is that the community here is smaller (but growing!) so the documentation tends to be scarcer and less groomed.

If you’re not much of a coder, you can still get a lot of mileage out of the Snippets that are available in the repositories.

SVN is a version control software package, by the way... it’s often used to track coding projects. I do a lot of coding, and I’m still crusty with using SVN to check out and check in files. If you’re up for it, you can download the latest version of Revolution and install it to see how it looks... but it’s not a polished release yet, so you’d be flying a bit in the dark.

I’ve been putting together tutorial videos for MODx on one of my sites:
http://www.tipsfor.us/

For more on how to get and install the SVN version of MODx 2.0 Revolution Alpha, look here: here. The MODx Manager is still a little shaky in the Alpha when using IE so FF or Safari are better choices.

For more on SVN and a good client to use with it, look here.