Is modx for me? can it do this? updated

Hi there people.
In the last week or so I’ve bee experimenting with various cms to fulfill a small project I am going to hopefully start.
Eventually I came to learn of modx and what I’ve read in the past hours got me excited as it might finally be the tool I was looking for.

Basically I need to set up a small real estate agency, nothing particularly fancy. I need to be able to have 2 main "categories" (sell and rent). For each category I need to be able to fill a form with specific content (tv seems rather useful for this)

What I haven’t been able to really understand for sure is:
- any way to submit content from the frontend? (by a specifically registered user)

- are there any search tool built in?
**solved** it seems there is not! first time I see a cms without a built in search engine..weird... anyway I added simplesearch and it does what it says. the cool part is that it searches inside tv too. That’s groovy!

- I see no easy way to manage media... I guess that installing some extras will help? (like fancy image popups or galleries)
**solved** more or less... there’s the internal file manager and some others plugs in I need to check. Not straightforward for sure as in joomla or others but well..

- can someone explain me the logic needed in modx to be able to have a dropdown listing a specific tv of all the content from a specific category?
example... let’s say I have 3 contents under "sell" category, and each has a different tv value (let’s call it location) of Paris, London or NY. I need the user to be able to select for example London and the system should present the relative page... or pages if there are more than 1 document with the London tv set)
I’ve been able to create the tv "location"... I miss the "search" part completely

**update** after reading tons of docs I realized that bindings might help me here. Even if I can dynamically build a "location" dropdown, how will I be able to pass parameters to the search (simplesearch)?
Now... I’m not a coder at all and I’d appreciate if someone can shed some light on this topic


Thanks at anyone that will give me any hint about this.

Ivan

You probably wouldn’t use simplesearch for this but rather dynamic ditto calls. Have a look at this http://www.kunane.com/modx/ditto-multiple-filters.html. It might help you move forward.

Also look here http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php?topic=48151.0

first of all thanks for your reply!!! After so many views and 0 answers I was thinking of leaving modx for something more easy for me.
you gave me hope
But since I’m an hopeless coder I got stuck in the middle of that great tutorial!

Do you have idea of what I should do after the point 3? I think the next step is to create pages (resources in modx lingo I guess) where I select values form the dropdown tv made before?

Then how do I search for them? I guess I should make a search form appear with some code magic.

You know I owe you a pizza and beer if you help me here

Thanks
Ivan

That’s a nice way to do dropdown list searches. Great Post.

What I haven’t been able to really understand for sure is:
- any way to submit content from the frontend? (by a specifically registered user)

There is and it’s something I’ve been looking into too. I’ve found it doesn’t cover the same editing/creation abilities as the manager interface although it uses the same rich text editor.

So far I’ve done it with two snippets, NewsEditor and NewsManager. As for specific registered users I opted to use WebLoginPE. I’ve had to change some of the mechanics behind NewsEditor to correct a few issues:

Changing Alias names on saving
Incorporating TV Variables
Issues with chunks

Good luck finishing your site off.

- any way to submit content from the frontend?

You could try PubKit, which has its origins in dissatisfaction with the limitations of NewsPublisher: http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,50187.0.html.
KP

I have looked at it but alas found it a little heavier than I’ve ever needed and setup time was on the low side.. It looks really good though. I guess I’ve just gotten into a habit of tweaking the old stuff to handle what I need.