Is MODx a good choice for small community group?

Thanks Guys!

I went to bed last night and ran the battery down in my wife’s Powerbook reading through MODx Forum posts.

I think I have found my CMS!

I managed to duplicate the club Home page in MODx. It took a little trial and error getting the CSS file linked. I also had to do some thinking about setting the paths for the image files (CSS background images and direct html images.)

Next comes figuring out the links/navigation, creating templates, chunks and the dynamic sections. Fortunately I have decent XHTML and CSS skills.

As far as I can tell the big attraction with MODx is that you can create your site and CSS YOUR WAY. Using the bigger systems like Drupal means having to backward engineer other designs or "themes" etc. I see the power of MODx is being able to convert existing static sites to a dynamic CMS system.

Installing a forum is still an issue but that could be done as its own page (separate install) on the same server, no?

Anyway, baby steps...

Thanks again!

Max

Good to hear that you are sticking around
You will find MODx to be extremely flexible and there are often many ways to get things done.

Next comes figuring out the links/navigation, creating templates, chunks and the dynamic sections.

This first site will ba a bit more effort but once you get the terms down it is a breeze. Basically you have the following building blocks:
1) Template - HTML file with document and template variables as placeholders for content
2) Document Variables - Placeholders for all the document specific content placeholdres (page title, long tile, content, ...)
3) Template Variables - Extended content variables specific to each document and associated to a template
4) Chunks - Blocks of reusable HTML code that you can use in your template or as building blocks for snippet output
5) Snippets - special resources built in php code

There are also modules and plug-ins but these are more specific so I will let you discover these on your own (and honestly I don;t know much about them yet).

One of the biggest highlights of MODx are the Template Variables (most commonly referred to as TV) which allow you to have custom content setups. Definitely worth checking out.
Here is the documentation: http://modxcms.com/template-variables.html

And here is a user to user discussion about TVs:
http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,9989.msg72198.html

Yes you can have the forum as a separate application on the same server.