MODx: powerful project for powerful brains. thank you and goodbye.

@chinesedream:

I feel the exact way as you describe it. I also like to learn and now my way around solving problems, but the overall complexity of everything working together (MODx own functions, PHP, SQL, CSS, Javascript and HTML) is quite high, and MODx is VERY good at mixing all those elements nicely, but everything in plain code snippets.

My concrete problems are not in installing the modules, but calling those items within the template in an organized fashion (and really now what I am doing). Nested calls of functions and queries inside other functions inside Tags called by scripts formated by layers of CSS are a bit much for me.-)

I’d like to just add my 2p in here.

I started using MODx about this time last year, after being left completely baffled by Mambo and Joomla and a few other CMSs. I got to grips with Drupal virtually straight away, but still it seemed lacking in the flexibility I required.

After playing with MODx for a week, I was extremely comfortable with it, and I had a site up and running the month after. Now, I’m 70% the way through completely re-developing that site with everything I need - RSS reader/writer, document commenting (with a moderation plugin in the manager), user ratings of documents, contact form with bot-protection, even live chat. And so far it’s taken me little over a month. Doing that completely by hand would have been a few months by now, and when it comes to maintenance, it’ll be a breeze.

However, it wasn’t all plain sailing. It was only about 3 months ago that I realised exactly what a template variable was for, and how easy it could make things. In the first site, I had two templates - one which rendered the site with a nav menu, the second without. All the inner DIVs and layouts were in the document’s content (which was a b*tch/almost impossible to update in TinyMCE). Now, I have 7 templates for different areas of the site, using TVs to render different sections and it’s so much easier to update/change.

As I see it, MODx is very much aimed at the Web Developer, not a Designer. @audioworld: if you’re implementing a new CMS with all the features you require (trackbacks, pings, database interfaces etc) then you need to be at a developer level so you can understand everything that’s going on under-the-hood. Sure the likes of WordPress and Drupal may let you do it all yourself, but what happens when (like with MODx) some of the functionality’s there, but you need to customise it further? Or your users want something you can’t give them. You need to be able to understand and know your choice of CMS to a level only slightly above that of it’s developers.

As an example, in my day-job, we use Microsoft Sharepoint as our corporate intranet. Thankfully I have no part in it’s maintenance or upkeep, because I hate it. Our main designer who updates the CSS hates it too, because of the layer of complexity it adds. We’ve just paid another company in the region of £20k to tailor Sharepoint as much to our needs as possible (which still wasn’t completely right). We’ve added extra components for RSS feeds, and a new HTML editor (because the default Sharepoint one is awful.) Had I been given the chance, I could have built an almost-identical intranet site in MODx in a month or two, for a fraction of the cost.

My point being... every CMS has it’s flaws, and every CMS is aimed at different audiences of different levels, and to find the perfect system for you, you need to be able to pick one that matches your needs as close as possible, and customise it.

As a web developer myself, I’m very much comfortable with coding, and I personally don’t think MODx should completely go down the GUI route. For example, in the early days when I was starting out, I could get a semi-decent website up and running with MS Frontpage. Now, I wouldn’t put a website up that I hadn’t personally edited the code behind. A GUI is great at getting up and running fast, but it assumes a lot of things that takes away the flexibility you often need. Even with the TinyMCE editor, I still find places where I have to edit the HTML code by hand.

The fact that you can add your own PHP snippets, or simply copy+paste ones from the repository in, only adds to MODx’s attraction. I mean the whole CMS is written in PHP, why shouldn’t you be able to customise it’s behaviour with further PHP snippets? Try adding a custom-created .NET class to Sharepoint - it’s sure not as easy as copy+paste! Once you’ve got your head around what TVs, snippets, plugins and modules are and how they’re supposed to be used - you’re golden! If i need something adding now, I can almost say straight away "ah yes, I can use a module/snippet/plugin to do that."

Anyway I think I’ve rambled on about nothing related to the original post - so I’ll leave it at that!

Andy.

Wow, great input guys, keep shooting !

Let me answer a few things :

Quote from: chinesedream at Sep 08, 2007, 07:46 PM

Is this a hint that GUI will be included in v0.9.7 or v1.0?

No hint, no, sorry

Just plenty of MODx experience !

One of the strength of the project is that it attract plenty of talents with a gift to deliver - unexpectedly early - features we didn’t expect : MODx Resources Wizard is probably one year ahead (or more) than what was planned...

Quote from: BobRay at Sep 09, 2007, 12:33 AM

So far, I’ve had pretty much every question I’ve asked here on the forums answered almost immediately--even some very elementary questions. One of the great things about MODx is the spirit of cooperation one finds among the MODx community. People have gone to great lengths to help me solve various problems, even problems that had nothing to do with MODX. MODx beats everything I’ve seen when it comes to code reusability, maintainability, and economy. It also kicks butt in allowing you to delegate work to other users without risking any serious damage to a site.

Well said !
I’ll add that to the testimonies

Quote from: andyccn at Sep 09, 2007, 09:34 AM

As I see it, MODx is very much aimed at the Web Developer, not a Designer.

As I said earlier, totally in disagreement with that !

I think MODx has been focused a lot on easy templating and full control design-wise (let me thank devs and resources contributors again for that), and even allow for unprecedented power for designers without touching any PHP !!! I know it has opened many doors for me !

Textpattern shares the same logic - with less power : the use of chunk as templates (in txp, known as forms) and placeholders to control formatting and position (in txp, tags) is one of the greatest thing ever built. Also, the ability to pass parameters into snippet calls (txp plugins work the same way) is another level of "no need of PHP" customization which can’t be easily equaled by GUI based extensions IMHO.

Now it doesn’t mean being a developper isn’t a bonus and takes you to another level : it sure does, as for any CMS/CMF powered website if you need high level customizing you’ll need PHP (or whatever language) skills no doubt. But MODx takes you further than any other CMS without needing to hire a developper

Quote from: andyccn

As a web developer myself, I’m very much comfortable with coding, and I personally don’t think MODx should completely go down the GUI route.

And as a webdesigner, I’ll agree 100% with you !
I don’t want to loose what makes MODx flexibility !!!

I’ll just add that the MODx distribution shouldn’t ship with this kind of GUI, but why not - like the resources wizard - have a "GUI templates" module or a "GUI for snippets" module ?

Thanks for your response David.

I personally see MODx as aimed at the developer, in part due to the amount of customisation that can be done - for example, to get a new snippet installed and working you need to copy+paste the snippet code, then place the snippet in the right place in the template. If you don’t know what the code does, it can be a bit confusing.

To please a designer, there would be a graphical installer which might, for example, download and install the snippet code in the background, then allow you to drag and drop into the page where you need it in the template. Once you’ve placed the snippet on the page, there’d be a UI to add/change in the parameters. Take Sharepoint’s concept of webparts for example - those are ideal for a designer to drag and drop on the page. A developer market however would create the code behind the webpart, then install it in the system for a designer to use.

Notice how this is tied in to the GUI argument too! In my experience, designers only care about how a site looks, not what the code behind it does. Also notice the "completely" bit in my sentence A better GUI would indefinitely improve the experience especially for new/moderate users, and yes I agree about there being a better GUI for snippets etc. - e.g. to add parameters, which (in the snippet code) then generates the code to validate the parameters on running of the snippet.

Equally, though, I love the way that absolutely anything can be changed in MODx, to the point of Plugins listening to events to change the core logic (although more documentation on plugins would be useful as I’ve still not figured them out yet!

I am new to MODx and have been faced with a few of the ’problems’ mentioned in the previous posts regarding the documentation and the MODx way of doing things.

The community here is a good one, actually, I think that the state of the documentation seems to make the repeat and newbie questions understandable, and the patience level is much higher than most communities I have been around.

In my POV I find there is plenty of documentation, what I miss are a few examples on how to use it (ie; more wiki tutorials).

I think that MODx is very much for designers, so much so that a GUI would only interfere with the creative freedom (to GUI the side bar in K2 is easy, all k2 sites have the same sidebar). However, MODx is also very much the developers CMS since you can basically tap into it very easily through the API and take it to a whole new level. Therefore MODx can be everyones CMS

what I miss are a few examples on how to use it (ie; more wiki tutorials).

You have hit the nail on the head with this, this is one fantastic gem which I wish I had discovered earlier, however as what I guess you would call a "hobbiest" if only the documentation would put a few examples somewhere, for example I had a problem getting the AjaxSearch to work how I wanted it, I found a page full of parameters but to the non developer and at my level I could not work out which ones would give the required result and then after help in the forum suddenly realized I had put the same parameter on the landing page also.

My point is you could probably narrow down all the newbie questions asked by people like me to a handful mostly how to set up the existing built in features like wayfinder Ajax Search etc then show about 3 or 4 different examples on each with the complete code to get the most commonly used effects and people could then build from this. Most of my knowledge came from installing the sample site on set up then working though various bits to see how they were set to make them work.

If these full code examples could be added to the wiki or even a most commonly asked sticky thread on the forum I guess this would stop a lot of the how to asked by people like me who are new to this.

However apart from this one area I am very pleased with MODx

Thanks for reading now feel better

Ian

Quote from: ian_m at Sep 09, 2007, 03:47 PM

what I miss are a few examples on how to use it (ie; more wiki tutorials).

You have hit the nail on the head with this, ....

My point is you could probably narrow down all the newbie questions asked by people like me to a handful mostly how to set up the existing built in features like wayfinder Ajax Search etc then show about 3 or 4 different examples on each with the complete code to get the most commonly used effects and people could then build from this. Most of my knowledge came from installing the sample site on set up then working though various bits to see how they were set to make them work.

If these full code examples could be added to the wiki or even a most commonly asked sticky thread on the forum I guess this would stop a lot of the how to asked by people like me who are new to this.

I can’t agree more but, having done a lot of documentation over the years, I can see why this goal is so seldom met.

The developers, after all, have to spend their time developing and chasing down bugs. They’ll put in some sketchy documentation but, often, it won’t really help someone who’s new to the project. The best docs are written by people who’ve just figured out how things work and remember how little sense it made to them at first. Unfortunately, they have less committment to the project, less confidence that they understand things well enough to explain them without making mistakes, and there are usually still things they don’t completely understand. They’re also hesitant to do that much work when the results might be made erroneous or completely useless when new versions come out.

As docs go, the stuff here is actually pretty good, even compared to huge commercial products. Microsoft’s help systems, for example, are almost completely useless for new users.

At least 95% of the documentation I’ve seen over the years is only clear to people who already know what it means. Everyone else has to read and reread the docs, study the source code, ask questions on forums, and use trial and error to make things work.

One shining exception to all this is the PHP manual: http://www.php.net/manual/en/. PHP is the only major piece of software that I’ve learned without buying a single book. The catch is that it has an editor, seven authors, countless contributors, and a sizable team maintaining the user notes. It also has a superb, well-organized table of contents that appears to have been planned before any content existed. If MODx had something like that, we’d all be in hog heaven.

In the meantime, we have each other.

Bob

Quote from: andyccn at Sep 09, 2007, 02:22 PM

I personally see MODx as aimed at the developer, in part due to the amount of customisation that can be done - for example, to get a new snippet installed and working you need to copy+paste the snippet code, then place the snippet in the right place in the template. If you don’t know what the code does, it can be a bit confusing.

The copy/paste and placing in the template is actually what I like about MODx as a designer. I don’t think designers are afraid of code : html, css, js are code which we are a bit used to. More often than not, designers have a general understanding of PHP, e.g we grasp the general meaning of the stuff without being able to write it (a bit like learning a few words of a foreign language, but not being able to build sentences). Hell, a few designers have started coding PHP ! I am not sure we can split designers/coders-dev into neat well defined categories.

As I said, having "design aware devs" helped MODx turn into a designer’s dream

And well, might be shocking but you can figure out what the code does without knowing what it does in detail.
The main things a snippet does is described and you have the parameters which tell a lot about it too.

Quote from: andyccn

To please a designer, there would be a graphical installer which might, for example, download and install the snippet code in the background, then allow you to drag and drop into the page where you need it in the template. Once you’ve placed the snippet on the page, there’d be a UI to add/change in the parameters.

Might please the end user, but not the designer which will rather keep full control of his templates. Not sure GUI would make room for classes, ids, choosing a span over a div or whatever html elements he wants his data wrapped into Nor will it allow for easy use of jQuery, mootools or the likes...

No, I really do think the current system is the best there will ever be...
The key of MODx templating is allowing designers to control their template’s code while benefiting from advanced + customized features without writing a line of PHP

I too don’t think that there should be a GUI. I haven’t tried it out but reading the documentation for the Resource Manager, I think that this is a really good step in the right direction.

I personally feel that what frustrates people is that learning MODx is a bit tricky when you have expectations that it might work like Joomla or Drupal or WordPress and find out that it is like none of these. Additionally, much of the documentation skips over basics like the definitions of key terms in other documentation. It is assumed that you have read the main docs from start to finish and so you end up scratching your head and looking at references and not figuring out things.

Call me thick but until recently (and I have been using MODx for well over a year) that I didn’t clue into some really basic stuff that while I was doing it didn’t recognize that there were similarities or commonalities.

It makes me think that it is time for an "Absolute Beginners Guide to MODx" or something like Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby for MODx.

C’mon, guys. I’m a granny with only a high school education, was a stay-at-home mom, and taught myself how to program, build and repair PCs about the same time my first grandchild was born. I’ve used ’Nuke, Xoops, and a couple other CMS systems I’ve forgotten, modded CubeCart , and decided that MODx is the best of them all, so I’m focusing on it. If I can do this, anybody can .