Hello everyone! A special thank you to the developers of this wonderful cms.
I’ve read and read on the flexibility and ease of modifying any template through CSS and XHTML, but I’m truly stumped. Now, I’m not a developer, or in any way proficient in coding. But I have a good grasp of CSS. I also migrated here from Textpattern...just so you know.
Here’s what I need for this site I’m building. Any suggestions about the easiest way to achieve this are truly (really) appreciated.
1)This is a magazine style site (three columns on main, and two columns on articles page). The articles and other content have different bylines, so it can’t have a blog style ("posted by....date). The frontpage/homepage has a featured story that changes three times a week and will be archived as an article under a category.
2) Multipage articles: There are some very long articles that need to be paginated over 2-5 pages. There full length transcripts which can exceed 20 pages each. I can’t seem to find any documentation on how to do this in MODx where the article is broken into parts but has ONE URL. I read a tutorial on using javascript and divs (<div id="page1, page2">etc., ) but this seems too complicated. Also, these articles will have a designated "print.css" so you can get the whole thing.
3) Navigation: The dropmenu will not work (aesthetically) for the above. In fact, I’d like to omit it completely. When you get to 50-80 articles it becomes messy.
What I’d like to have is a top nav with sections, ie Articles, Interviews, Resources, Reviews...etc. When you click on the articles section, you’re taken to a page with a secondary nav (left or right sidecar) with categories, ie "blue wigets", "red widgets," "green widgets" and this can expand to include the separate articles under that heading. (Does this make sense?)
4) This site has sponsored advertising, google adsense & google search. Is the best way to incorporate these elements via a TV or chunk?
5) Finally, all pages, (articles, reviews, interviews) can be linked to each other ("for more on this topic, see...")
I’m attempting to make this very user friendly, without too many clicks and simple navigation. But also, we need this site to be SEO friendly, URL friendly and have the ability to update and include new articles easily.
Thank you for your time. I hope you can help me figure this out. As an example, think of A List Apart’s site for a framework.
MODX Staff