New to Modx - Looks Great for SEO

I’m very excited that I found Modx because I see the potential for the templates and the semantic HTML.

I was wondering if anyone had tried building a site like Soh Tanaka’s http://www.sohtanaka.com/web-design/markup-hierarchy-advantages-seo/ with code arranged for weight. Given Google’s recent "Reasonable Surfer Patent," this might be even more important or less important, but I think it makes good sense.

<pre>
<body>
[content]
[chunk-for-right-bar]
[chunk-for-header]
[chunk-for-footer]
[chunk-for-javascripts]
</body>
</pre>

This has me really excited, but what if I wanted my right bar to be slightly different for each page?

My questions:

1. Can their be two content sections on a single page?
2. How is Modx Revolution’s HTML5 support?

My first question is pretty self-explantory.

My second question is actually tied to the first because of the new implications of <article> or seperating something into <sections>.

I could imagine a mechanism for writing content that would allow for:

<pre>
<body>
<content>
[article-header]
[section]
[section]
[section]
[article-footer]
</content>
[chunk-for-right-bar]
[chunk-for-nav]
[chunk-for-footer]
[chunk-for-javascripts]
</body>
</pre>

Also has anyone tried integrating http://52framework.com/ - with Modx?

Hi, and Welcome to MODx!

I don’t know about HTML5, I don’t use it yet because many things are not supported by browsers, anyway I’ll try to answer the other questions:

This has me really excited, but what if I wanted my right bar to be slightly different for each page?

I think that there are several way of doing it (due to the flexibility of MODx ), here are two examples:
1) Using Template Variables http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/Create_TV-Based_Chunks
2) Using IF Statements with PHx http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/PHx

I am pretty sure that there are other ways but I am still a noob .

1. Can their be two content sections on a single page?

Sure, you can have one, two, three billion content sections. You can add a content section in this way:
1) Go to Elements > Manage Elements > Template Variables > New Template Variable. Fill in the fields like this:
Template Variable Name: content-2
Description: Secondary content area
Input Type: RichText
Template Access: Select the template where you want the additional content area to appear

2) Open the template and add the Template Variable like so: [*content-2*]
3) Open the Resource, you should now see the new content area at the bottom of the page.

Hope this helps

Your version of HTML is irrelevant to MODx, it simply adds the content you tell it to into the template you give it (or no template at all). It will equally happily produce pure XML or plain text, a strict XHTML 1.1 page or a table-based page with no doctype at all, a .css or even an .xls document. All it requires are <head></head> and <body></body> tags for inserting javascript code or CSS if you’ve used any of the regClient...() functions.

I’m using exclusively HTML 5 these days; it’s easy enough to compensate for browsers that don’t recognize it using CSS, and to test using the modernizr.js script. At this point I’m just using it for structure, though, and not getting into the "canvas" or any other functional features. But I figure by the time it’s safer to use them, I’ll be so used to it that it won’t be any problem at all to learn how to use them.

Here’s one way to use TVs to control the blocks of content in your sidebars http://www.sottwell.com/tv-input-types.html

Thanks for the feedback guys!

I was thinking more in the content management area of ModX if there were any plans to include sections for content.

Something like:

Header
Article
Footer

As I dig more into ModX, I’m understanding that it wouldn’t work like some of the other Content Management Systems and my preconceptions were taking me down the wrong path.

No, there’s no need to do that with MODx, your HTML is all yours to do with as you wish.

Quote from: ckluis at Jun 21, 2010, 08:20 AM

I was thinking more in the content management area of ModX if there were any plans to include sections for content.

Something like:

Header
Article
Footer

As I dig more into ModX, I’m understanding that it wouldn’t work like some of the other Content Management Systems and my preconceptions were taking me down the wrong path.

As others have pointed out - template variables offer you things like that.

Using ManagerManager you could easily change the appearance of the edit pages also.

So from a purely HTML5 & SEO perspective the best ModX template would be something like:



Then based on the page your header would include some authentication items (google, yahoo, etc) for homepage or not.

The article would be the content section. Since HTML5 allows for multiple H1 tags - this would make it easier to repurpose or summarize data from multiple blog posts on an aggregated page.

Sidebar is self explanatory.

Navigation is the menu structure - which from an SEO perspective is better placed below your content and positioned via CSS. So if I had the same menu structure, but some pages had links with rel=nofollow - would that be a TV for the rel attribute or would you create your 2/3 menu variations and then apply them via a TV?

Footer - is a footer. I would see an area on the footer that would in essence be:



Am I understanding this better now?

HTML 5 Link:
Page Organization Link:
Mega Menu Navigation