Please advise

First of all, I am a complete modx newbie. I’ve been reading about it for a few days now and I am almost convinced that I should use modx over Joomla for our company site. Note: I don’t have any experience with Joomla either, but what I’ve been hearing from my fellow designers and developers is how hard it is to modify it, etc...

Since most of you have tried other CMSs out there, maybe you can point me in the right direction in my search. Here is what I want our site to have and you can tell me if all of this is possible with modx (I am sure the answer will be yes):

- we’ll start with at least 150 pages of content
- we post new content every day
- we have a store on the site and would like to integrate a shopping cart (1shoppingcart specifically; I really don’t want to give this up as I like many of their features). I saw somewhere that there is a Product Management add-on...how does it work?
- member sign up to access member-only content (just a free sign up to encourage people to join our mailing list). Which reminds me, I played around with modx demo, created a page and couldn’t figure out how to make it visible only to members...

I read that I can have a forum, photo gallery, event calendar, SE friendly urls, meta tag control, content scheduling...that’s great! I’ll be using all of this too.

I am probably forgetting something else, but that’s most of it. Now I want your honest and unbiased opinion please

Thanks very much in advance!

Good luck finding an unbiased opinion here.

Many users here are former Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla users who are uniformly ecstatic about switching. I don’t think you’ll see a lot of ex-MODx users on the other CMS forums.

Everything you want is quite doable in MODx. Although you’ll have to get your hands a litle dirtier than you would on some other platforms, you’ll have a much cleaner design and more control over the site when you’re done.

To start you off: Every "news" item will be a separate document in MODx and you can display summaries/teasers of a selection of them using the Ditto snippet.

Restricting access to registered users is quite easy with the WebLogin or WebLoginPE snippet to register and log in users and assign them to user groups. Once you’ve set up the proper user groups and document groups, users will have access only to what they should (See the Permissions page at the site in my sig.)

The only potential hitch is the e-commerce stuff. Many users here use FoxyCart. I’ve not heard of anyone using the e-commerce solution you mention, so it’s hard to say how hard it would be to integrate with MODx. I’m sure it could be done -- how difficult it is depends on the design and API (if any) of the App.

Welcome to MODx.

Thanks, BobRay, for this and the other reply. Greatly appreciate it.

"Every "news" item will be a separate document in MODx and you can display summaries/teasers of a selection of them"
That’s awesome. I want to have a lifehacker.com type of article previews.

So, do you think a designer with some very, very basic programming skills can set up such a site with modx? (minus the ecomm stuff...I know that will be a pain)

You don’t need much beyond basic html/css skills. If you read the documentation on things it should all make sense or if your unsure just ask and someone can help you.

In my experience the member login will be the hardest but achevable, as for the shop can that just be included via a <iframe> to save on the complication ??

I won’t even worry about member login for now...I’ll leave it to phase 2. As for the shop, I dunno...I think I might just do it the non-programmer, inefficient way of just making it in html and add the "add to cart" buttons (that 1shoppingcart provides) next to each product.

Re: iframe idea...I don’t think you can embed an https page inside an unsecure page. I am just guessing...but it wouldn’t be a good idea.

All in all, I am very excited to have stumbled on modx...looking forward to playing with it.

Quote from: cyberstar at Oct 27, 2009, 06:48 PM

As for the shop, I dunno...I think I might just do it the non-programmer, inefficient way of just making it in html and add the "add to cart" buttons (that 1shoppingcart provides) next to each product.

You should be able to just add those buttons to a MODx page. In fact, you ought to be able to have a template variable with the page-specific part of the button code and then use a tag for that TV as part of the button code in either the content area or the template. The generic button code could probably go in a chunk also. So the chunk would look like this:



And in the template or page content, you’d have this where you want the button:



I would probably hard-code the button code in the page content first until everything is working, then create the TV and chunk.

I’d also keep the Rich Text editor off, at least while working on the button stuff.

Hope this makes sense.

Quote from: cyberstar at Oct 26, 2009, 08:47 PM

I read that I can have a forum, photo gallery, event calendar, SE friendly urls, meta tag control, content scheduling...that’s great! I’ll be using all of this too.

I’ve also been looking for a good CMS to use (but with forums and wikis) but haven’t found an answer yet. Your point about having a forum using MODx is not possible. MODx does not provide forums.

The only way you can have forums is by installing SMF (the preferred forum software here) or any other forum software and integrate it with MODx. This means managing different installations and managing using different administration panels (in my knowledge). There seems to be a single sign on (SSO) extension available for MODx. That might help users use a single logon for your site and the forums.

The above is based only on things I’ve read. I don’t have practical experience with MODx or SMF.