Is MODx Suitable For This Type of Site?

I am hoping to build a Webzine-like site that looks very similar to the BusinessWeek (http://www.businessweek.com/) Web site.

I want this Web site to have sections for the following types of content:

• news stories
• product reviews
• featured content

I want to be able to display the latest news stories, feature content and product reviews on the front page in different sections, and I would like to have a section of each primary page (news, reviews, features) dedicated to displaying a slideshow/carousel of the newest articles, similar to the BusinessWeek site.

Also, like the BusinessWeek Web site, I want to be able to dynamically change the sidebars to display related content. For example, if the visitor is reading a story about a particular product, I want the sidebar to display the latest features, news articles and an image of the related product on the sidebar. I believe this is accomplished with the Views module on Drupal... I’m hoping something similar exists for MODx.

I am expecting to add over 100 articles per month to the system, and I will be hiring multiple authors to contribute to the site as well.

Honestly, I would just like to know how much of what is accomplished on the BusinessWeek Web site would be reasonable suitable for MODx. If MODx is not the best solution, please let me know as I would rather avoid frustration and use MODx at a later time for another project in that case.

I’ve already looked at Drupal, but have been frustrated with the amount of effort that is required to properly theme a Web site.

In the end, I guess what I’m asking is if the following is possible:

• Can a user easily create "blocks" that are dynamically updated depending on the contents of an article?
• Is it possible to pull the latest articles from a certain section of content (like, if I wanted to pull the 5 latest review articles)?
• Is there any concept of content types within MODx?
• What, on the BusinessWeek Web site, would be difficult to replicate within MODx?
• Is there a better solution than MODx and/or easier solution than Drupal to accomplish this?

In other words, if you were going to build a site that was very similar and had the core functionality of a site like BusinessWeek’s, would MODx be a realistic solution?

You can do pretty much anything with modx. However, for a site comparable to Business Week, with thousands of articles/reviews and multiple contributors, you will find that the document tree and TVs are not an appropriate way to manage them. Sorting, searching, tagging and cross referencing many thousands of articles is a job for a custom data model. It actually doesn’t matter what CMS you use this will still be the case (in my view).

In practical terms you can think of modx documents as the views in your application, and use snippets to extract the article data from a custom database table in various ways. You would need to build an administration area for articles; this could be a module, or front end admin area (in Evolution) or a fully integrated Component in Revolution¹. The administration area may make use of the modx api, for user authentication and accessing your tables (xpdo is the way to go imo) - and to hook in to the extjs UI in Revolution - or you could just roll your own solution so it’s all self contained (and thus portable).

The only bit of the Business Week site you might struggle with is the financial data; getting the live market data in the first place and then plotting it on charts and graphs. I’m attempting to do something similar right now, and would love to know if anyone else has done this.

Mark

¹http://svn.modxcms.com/docs/display/~splittingred/2008/06/26/Writing+a+3rd+Party+Component+in+MODx+Revolution%2C+Pt.+I