Initial good impressions of MODx.
1. Has fairly good documentation.
2. Generates valid HTML.
3. Browser-independent, so far as I can tell. Works nicely with Opera, so far.
4. The management interface let me use my browser’s back button to return where I came from.
5. Allows pages to be selectively cached, according to the documentation. (I haven’t managed to get this working yet, but I’m sure I will eventually.)
6. Almost complete separation of web site from CMS, so CMS can be upgraded without touching or breaking the web site. Not so complete as Textpattern, but more complete than Drupal.
The installation was not without some problems.
1. If JavaScript is not enabled, the error message given is: "Please wait while MODx loads the page...". It took me a while to figure out that this should be interpreted to mean: "This web page requires you to enable JavaScript."
2. The MODx documentation refers to menu items that seem to have been moved around or renamed, so this caused some confusion.
3. Some of the management menu items (Site -> Home) duplicate other items, and the duplicate items aren’t always labeled exactly the same. It took me some time to figure out what duplicates what. E.g.:
Site -> Home -> Resources is a duplicate of Resources -> Manage Resources.
Site -> Home -> Security duplicates Security -> Manager users.
Probably obvious to an experienced user.
4. Shortly after I installed MODx, I locked myself out by mistyping the password a number of times. The login screen told me I had been locked out for a while, but it didn’t tell me for how long. After waiting quite a while, and finding myself still locked out, I then searched the documentation and found a solution -- resetting some variables in the MysSQL tables. It worked, but this is unnecessarily harsh to a first-time user. The default settings should be more kind (e.g., locking out a user for 1 minute at most -- that will slow down password-guessing attacks very effectively). Afterwards the web site admin can always make the defaults more strict.
5. My first attempt to learn how to use templates ended in complete confusion. I followed the very simple instructions at this web page:
http://modxcms.com/template-basics.html
I followed the instructions up to the point where it says "Here is a simple CSS file to control our template’s appearance". At this point, I was stuck. I had no idea what to do with the example CSS code presented there. None of the links on that web page told me where to put the CSS code. I assumed there was another menu item that would let me enter the CSS. I searched all the manager menus and found nothing.
The next day, after searching the documentation, I realized that unlike the template and the HTML, the CSS goes into a file in the filesystem, not into the database.
I am documenting these problems now because I get only one chance to be a first-time MODx user, so this oportunity will not come again.
Rahul
MODX Staff
