Not to sound too sarcastic, but it does make me wonder how a MODx install with example site installed can be called "jibberish" from someone with "proficient" coding knowledge. Sorry, those were the two things that really clashed for me in the above thread.
There are literally only about 5-10 non-standard HTML chunk/snippet calls in the default minimal template. The content one is called "content", the site_url one is called "site_url" etc. Even if you fiddle with the template then compare the finished page source in FF/IE with the template source in the MODx manager it should be pretty easy to work out what the less-obvious bits of code in the template are doing and slot your own template in in no time.
I remember it looking daunting when I first started with it, but I’m sure I had a site up inside of a week, even though I hadn’t fiddled with the template much. Again, some people "get it" easier than others as has been mentioned here already.
8 days getting nowhere on something that has a wealth of documentation as linked to in this thread seems most odd to me though personally.
With regards to actually getting a site up - I can do a relaively easy, small site in a long day now. That’s 6 hours designing a completely new layout in Photoshop, 3 hours cutting it up and coding the HTML template in Dreamweaver (I usually spend an hour faffing because of IE6 breaking my template), 10 minutes (if that) to get that template into MODx with all the relevant MODx tags in the right places and, for a small site where I’ve been supplied with the text and images, maybe another hour to put in 5-6 pages or so including any image resizing/placing. Oh, and the MODx install with the plugins/snippets I usually use takes about 20 mins tops.
Call it 11 hours total, with just 2 of those devoted to actually touching MODx
These would be brochure-type sites mind you with a handful of pages, a contact form and maybe a nice integrated Google/Microsoft map for getting directions to a business using code I’ve put together previously. There is one I’ve done that contains an awful lot of custom snippets and so forth that I’ve been working on for months (during the evenings), but as it’s a VERY dynamic site with several hundred thousand hits a month and I’m finding the work fun and it’s well worth the time. Also worth noting that the only other way I could have built it was using plain PHP and doing everything from scratch, so if we say I’ve been working on this one for 3 months or so off and on in my evenings, without MODx it would’ve been easily closer to 6-9 months or probably even more.
All that said, it’s definitely different strokes for different folks, but if you know HTML fairly well and have dabbled in a programming language before then it shouldn’t be rocket science. Still a potentially steep learning curve depending on what you’ve used previously I’ll admit, but not as steep as becoming a rocket scientist
It’s also worth noting that MODx works best (IMO) as a framework to build on. Those looking for lots of built-in modules here may be perplexed with MODx as they’re (possibly) expecting something like Joomla where you have a "simple" (well I found more than a few elements most counter-intuitive if I’m honest) GUI but lot of bloat added in by default and are restricted quite a lot of the time to how those modules work, where as MODx is something you can hand-craft precisely to the customer’s specs with the only limitation being your own coding knowledge and imagination. I’ve yet to run into a stumbling block with MODx which I couldn’t code my way through from a mixture of tutorials and forum topics or by expanding my own coding knowledge (usually my stumbling blocks are self-imposed silliness anyway
).
To all potential new users: If you get some time to look at it where you’re not pressured by pending jobs then it’s definitely worth learning.
MODX Staff
