newbie-itis

hi,
just another pesky newbie with a bad case of newbieness....
please, can someone point me to simple directions regarding how to post news articles or maybe blog posts into distinct categories, and then of course display these categories in a drop down menu.
i am trying to start a News Magazine and want to have sections for articles about various topics - food, murder, sports, etc.... and have the articles listed by date while displaying newest ones first.
modx seems liek the bag-o-trix i need - but i dunno how to use it.
thnx
kjb

Please read the documentation, wiki and forum posts to refine your question.
This is a bit all encompassing here

We can’t really help you unless you make the first step, your question is too general and abstract...
Thanks !

I recommend that you download and install MODx with the sample data in a local environment and see how the site is put together. This helps visualize how it goes together.

There are a few ways of doing what you want, you could use a container or ’folder’ for each category and simply create documents in the corresponding container. This will work well if the new to category is a 1/1 basis. However if an article can be in various categories a tag based setup may be better.

Creating documents and containers is well covered in the docs, there is a good wiki post Beginer’s Guide to MODx that has some good info: http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/Beginner%27s_Guide_to_MODx

The tools that you will need to get going are Wayfinder to setup the navigation menu; Ditto to display news indexes (intro with read more links); AjaxSearch (or TvExplorer) for searching the news.

You can definitely use MODx right out of the box to build the type of site you have described. There is obviously some learning to be done first but the process should be straight forward. Have fun.

thnx.
all considered, i think the tag based setup will work better here than a folder based set-up.
this really does point me in a better direction. thnx

To do it with tags you will do good to get to know Ditto’s tagging features. Check out the Ditto sub site and watch the screencast on tagging. Also look at the demo site content to see a simple tagging example.

http://ditto.modxcms.com/

You could use a snippet like tvTagCloud to build the navigation from the tags.

I too am suffering from "newbie-itis". I installed the latest, greatest version of MODx, including the sample web site.
I also read the wiki and figured I would try to create a simple blog. On my MODx welcome screen, I right clicked and viewed
the example blog. I followed the directions. If I create a webuser, I get an incorrect passwd/user message when I try to log in
as that user. When a I create a regular user (non web user) , it works fine. What am I doing wrong ?

Thanks,

Jim


PS I am running Windows XP SP2, Firefox 2.0.0.11, and Apache HTTP Server 2.2.4

Quote from: jimsch216 at Jan 21, 2008, 08:49 PM

I too am suffering from "newbie-itis". I installed the latest, greatest version of MODx, including the sample web site.
I also read the wiki and figured I would try to create a simple blog. On my MODx welcome screen, I right clicked and viewed
the example blog. I followed the directions. If I create a webuser, I get an incorrect passwd/user message when I try to log in
as that user. When a I create a regular user (non web user) , it works fine. What am I doing wrong ?

Thanks,

Jim

Why you need an web user account while you can use your administrator user which is rule id#1 ?
You might have just mixed the user account usabilities?, BTW you can manage your site form the back-end or the manager center!,
You can access there by going to www.yoursite.com/manager or http://localhost/modx/manager & ofcourse by entering the manager user/pass that you have given to the MODx at the time of installation. :-]

I was trying to follow the documentation for creating a simple blog.

"
How to Start Posting with MODx Mini-Blogs

Setting up a mini-blog is relatively simple. Here’s what you need to do to get started with making new posts:

1. Login to the MODx Control Panel.
2. Create a new Webuser by clicking the Users > Manage web users link.
3. Make sure to check the Site Admins Webuser Group at the bottom of the page.
4. Go to the login page and login using this newly created Webuser information.
5. You should now notice a new Add a Blog Entry menu item that automatically appeared under the Blog Page link in the right column.
"

Thanks,

Jim

As MotSmart stated above, you can manage your blog through manager interface.
Actually you can do everything with manager center.

But if you want to manage it from the front-end, you can do so.

I suppose you are trying to login into manager center with webuser ID and Pass ?
Webuser can not login to "somedomain.com/manager".
You have to use it in the front end.

Thanks for the clarification. I’d always logged in with the manager and did not realize that webusers could not
log in to the system in that fashion.


Thanks again to you and MotSmart,

Jim