Photowebmax,
I have to chime in here and say I think that some of what you’ve experienced is bad luck. My very first MODx site was for a political organization that wanted photo galleries managed by members, a series of news stories (also contributed by members) with the most recent ones aggregated on the home page, a newsletter page that listed downloadable .PDF newsletters, and an events calendar. I ended up using Ditto, NewsPublisher, Wayfinder, MaxiGallery, WebLogin, Personalize, and a few other snippets.
I was lucky enough to get the right help from the right people here at the right times and put it all together in fairly short order, considering how new I was to MODx. My only advantage over you was some prior experience with programming in other languages (Visual Basic, C++, MS Access, etc.). I had very little experience with PHP and none with Javascript.
I think maybe the biggest difference between us is that my programming experience taught me that you can have a real mess on your hands but be one misplaced comma away from having everything working. I also learned a lot about perseverence, debugging strategies, and how to frame requests for help, all of which come in pretty handy with MODx.
In your struggles, you may have actually been very close to having things working and, with a little more luck, you might have got there.
Your points about the forums and the documentation have been made many times before but bear repeating. The MaxiGallery docs, for example, tell you the possible parameter values but not why you’d want to use one or the the other or what they really do. &max_thumb_size is obvious enough, but what *is* "pictureview" and why would I want to use it? What does "embedded" really mean? What’s the difference between a mask and a dropshadow? I don’t mean to pick on MaxiGallery as there are snippets with much worse docs than MaxiGallery’s.
OpenGeek is right that these are not MODx but MODx addons, but you’re right, IMHO, that MODx will absolutely be held back by the sketchy documentation of its major add-ons. I should mention, also, that OpenGeek has been amazingly patient and helpful in responding to problems I’ve had with thorny MODx problems along with many others here.
That said, MODx is relatively new, the docs are much better now than when I started using MODx and they are improving all the time.
The biggest problem, as I see it, is there’s not enough correction of the docs based on forum questions. If someone asked me a question about a snippet I wrote, my first response (after answering it) would be to see if I could re-write the snippet’s docs so the question never came up again. Not everyone has time to do this (some people here have real jobs
) so the same questions keep coming up over and over. The irony is that improving the docs would free up a lot of the time that’s spent answering the same questions over and over.
Bob
MODX Staff
