I stated in another topic that I don’t think Revolution is quite ready to be used, but some other members and MODx staff made some insightful comments about the need for developers to help get Revolution going, rather than keep calling it "not ready." My response to this is to start with a fresh copy of Revolution (probably SVN, rather than the beta; please make suggestions regarding this) and migrate what I have so far for my site (www.compeek.net) to it and then continue to develop the site using Revolution. My prior objection was the lack of Ditto, but with the recently released getResources snippet (thanks!), I think I have enough to get started; thinking about it, I also can’t think of an immediate need for Ditto with this site anyway.
This site is actually relatively simple. It will contain a small number of informative pages about my website creation services, a basic portfolio, and a way to contact me with interests in hiring me. The informative pages will be easy to set up with MODx; I don’t foresee any hassles there. The portfolio will probably be a matter of some custom template variables and the getResources snippet to show clickable thumbnails on a page that link to pages specific to each entry; these pages will be pretty easy to set up with a custom template. For the contact page, I plan to learn and use SPForm as it is the only similar snippet I see in the package repository right now.
For the time being, I’m going to avoid including any sort of blog or news on the website. In my opinion, the blog that I am looking into getting started is not suited to be on this site because it isn’t really related. I’m not anywhere near big enough for somebody to be interested in reading news about my site, so I think that would be a waste of the time that would be necessary to create and maintain it.
I hope that this project will finally get me to actually learn MODx thoroughly so that I can become proficient with it. Currently I am developing a website for my church with the Evolution RC, but other than a Wayfinder call or two and a Ditto call here and there, I don’t feel like I’m really doing anything other than creating the HTML and CSS and letting MODx work by default. I appreciate the power of being able to set up MODx and have it serve all my pages easily, but this project is kind of wearing my down for other reasons, and I just don’t feel like I’m getting anything out of it regarding my desire to learn MODx. I’m hoping that this project with my own site will give me the freedom and flexibility to set out and learn this great CMS with no stress and no frustrations.
Another big goal for me with this project is to become quite familiar with MODx behind the scenes, meaning PHP, so that I can create my own snippets (and possibly even components) when necessary in future projects. Of course, if I create a useful piece of code, I’ll be happy to share it with the community.
If nothing else, I’m posting this here as way to sort of motivate myself to get going on this project. I will post updates here if I discover something useful as the project progress, et cetera.
Please feel free to offer any comments or suggestions regarding this project. I’m open to any constructive criticism because I want this to be as successful a project as possible.
Edit: If this forum is not appropriate for this post, please move it to the correct one. Thanks!
