Lightweight alternative to MODx

Right now I’m leaning towards installing MODx for him and show him how to do the basics. Mostly because I’m not up to date with Textpattern and Wordpress anymore – gotten to used to MODx... But I’ll discuss the matter with him and we’ll see.

It’s times like these you wish 0.9.7 was final and someone built a simplified manager...

Thanks for all the suggestions!

Quote from: carlholmberg at Jan 06, 2008, 02:58 PM

Right now I’m leaning towards installing MODx for him and show him how to do the basics. Mostly because I’m not up to date with Textpattern and Wordpress anymore – gotten to used to MODx... But I’ll discuss the matter with him and we’ll see.

It’s times like these you wish 0.9.7 was final and someone built a simplified manager...

That’s what I’d do (and I’ve done it for several computer illiterates). Remember that you can make him a manager user and scale down the version of the manager he sees quite a bit. If you don’t want to bother with QuickEdit, you can just tell him to log in to the manager, right-click on a document in the tree (and you can limit which docs he can see there) and select edit. If he’s done any word processing, he should be fine with TinyMCE.

Bob

I have modified the manager/actions/help.static.php to provide a tabbed panel that accesses a set of .php files in a new manager/help folder. You can see it in action if you log in to my site’s manager as guest, password guestuser. On one site I even added a Help icon and link on the manager’s Welcome page to make it easier for the users to find it.

At this point, the help.static.php file needs to be edited to add or remove tabs, but it’s pretty simple, each tab is just a block like

I’m working on code to scan the help folder and generate the tabs based on the files it finds there. Then all you would need to do is add a new help file to the help folder with a name that you want as the title on the tab, like "Gallery.php".

This way you can have customized help for your clients that I’ve found already has cut my support requests to almost nothing.

Sounds great Susan – I will definitely have a look at that!

I’ve got the loop working now, and have released my "patch"

http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,21376.msg132077.html#msg132077

VERY cool Susan, indeed it’s gonna be a real improvement and will cut down support request

Scale back the permissions to pretty much just editing and document creating modes and the manager becomes much less intimidating. I’ve said it hundreds of times to folks in person, but it bears repeating here:

I’ve literally trained individuals ranging from auto mechanics to CEOs, and even the CEOs get it. It’s never taken more than 45-minutes and a couple of follow up calls of 10 minutes or less.

The problem I had with that is that the site I developed the help files for is a non-profit that frequently changes the membership of its "board". They also have an event calendar and a newsletter with two mailing lists to manage. So every few months I get panicky emails from a new editor, and have to go through the whole business again. I even gave them help documentation, but they kept losing it. Since I did this, they’ve had two new editors and not one email.