I’ve recently been looking for a good approach towards designing a web application that, at it’s core, is a wizard tool. However, rather than a standard n-step wizard process there is logic to help determine page navigation or the correct phrasing for a particular question.
A good analogy would be TurboTax online with a hierarchy of topics/steps.
After initial prototyping, a CMS appears to be a good choice as the content is expected to be in flux (rewordings, new pages, new workflows, etc.) We also envision a gallery and support for forum/discussion. Therefore we don’t want to reinvent the wheel and would like to easily modify the content.
I’m not particularly familiar with PHP, but MODx comes highly recommended.
Would it be a good choice for designing and configuring this type of wizard-style navigation?
I’ve poked around the website and forums, but didn’t find an obvious answer and figured some of you with more expertise could easily answer this or point me in the right direction.
I appreciate any help or tips!
Thanks!
Dave
It’s not an easy job, but I don’t think you’ll find any other CMS that would work as well as MODx for the task.
Is this because there isn’t an easy way to support this? Would it all be custom code for the logic to manage the navigation?
If so, that removes a large part of the benefit to have the content easily manageable and may steer us in a non-CMS direction. I understand if this is the case, as I’m not asking for a simple task. I’m just trying to make the most informed decision.
Any additional info you could provide on the perceived difficulties would be extremely helpful!
Cheers,
Dave
There may be some Wizard PHP classes out there, but I suspect that it would be mostly custom code.
That said, I think MODx has some extremely helpful tools that would support you. The template system, chunks, snippets, plugins, and especially template variables would make the work a whole lot easier to create and to maintain, IMO. And MODx’s MVC-OOP structure will help you separate data from presentation in a way that will save you a ton of time down the road. Not to mention the simplicity of xPDO for interacting with the DB in MODx Revolution.
The whole point of MODx is to provide tools that support you in creating a custom site without limiting what you can do in any way.
I used to code sites in straight PHP/HTML -- I’d never go back except for the most trivial sites.
The initial prototyping made use of Java, using GWT for the frontend. Given our Java experience it was not terribly difficult to set up the complex navigation (and some complex widgets that we want as well), but the content is currently stored in the presentation layer.
It would be nice to separate the content and number of options. The best we can do without writing our own mini-language would be to have static pages and fixed navigation with only the wording and options in a DB. Not quite as flexible as we’d like, but getting there with MODx may be more difficult.
Although, by sticking with the Java prototyped solution we must also link to some image gallery/discussion forum content from the app itself, which may prove difficult. Hopefully just a matter of accessing the underlying DB of any ready-made CMS that we can leverage.
I think you could translate your Java nav stuff to PHP and/or JS and move the content into chunks and/or documents. It’s definitely a huge plus to separate the content from the presentation layer.
