Design in MODx is oriented on “px”

<rant>
MODx and its layouts are mutually exclusive. Period!’

Anyone is welcome to design a layout in any fashion. I would argue that the accessibility merits gained by designing sites only using ems can in many cases be defeated by the purpose, market, user-expectations, user-level and overall information structure of a site. Some sites work well with a completely fluid layout, some sites don’t work at all. Visual design can impart as much of the message as the message itself. Design is communication. Some designs have boundries of width; some of height.

There is no trend or movement toward and entirely elastic web. There is no rule that says a site must be fixed to 768px wide or 950 px wide but things like user accepted norms, and interface conventions mean that jumping into foreign interface design can cause problems.

I design websites for business. The bottom line there is as a vehicle for selling and marketing of a product or service not as an exercise in ideal scenario user interfaces. Fulfilling user need, and making usable interfaces and presenting information in as good a manner as possible is the priority.

</rant>

Deep breath...

<rant class="calmer">
Designing crossbrowser compatible elastic templates in MODx is as easy to do as a standalone HTML page. HTML+CSS. Then slap in your MODx tags and kapow an elastic template. MODx is not Wordpress, Joomla, Mambo, Drupal. It is a content management framework and it is very much a DIY developers application. I don’t know very many people I have come across this site to use a template for MODx.

I would suggest that most people on this site and who use MODx use it because they can easily use their own creation without having to put in loops or copious numbers of function calls into the template or be stuck using dozens of rigid templates that you can’t change because they were poorly written in the first place.
</rant>

Cheers,

Jay

BTW I have been toying with creating a clone of the default Wordpress theme for MODx--just for laughs. -J

So Jay, do the repeated talks of templates/YAPS get under your skin from time to time?

Quote from: sottwell at Jan 22, 2008, 11:15 AM

You could even put up a blow-by-blow account of how you do it in the Wiki.

What is ’blow-by-blow’? I never heard of this expression before, yet it ’reads’ so vivid, but I can catch the actual meaning

Honestly no.

I have worked with templates in WordPress extensively and I find it a waste of time and effort. That being said the client pays for it so I do it. I have modded many a template from the WP repository and while frustrating, the worst offenders are eCommerce applications. If the developers of the OpenSource eCom applications spent 10% of their time doing user testing instead of seeing how many features they can cram into a zip file they would be incredible applications.

Let me restate. I heart MODx.

Jay

@chinesedream

blow-by-blow is a western reference that comes from the sport of boxing and fist fighting in general. To give a blow-by-blow explanation is to include every little detail.

Quote from: smashingred at Jan 22, 2008, 12:56 PM

@chinesedream

blow-by-blow is a western reference that comes from the sport of boxing and fist fighting in general. To give a blow-by-blow explanation is to include every little detail.

Thanks Jay!

It’s very bizarre, of all things one can pick on about the imperfection of Modx, yet one chooses the lack of em unit elastic template, yet knew nothing about how IE browsers work.

Quote from: smashingred at Jan 22, 2008, 12:56 PM

If the developers of the OpenSource eCom applications spent 10% of their time doing user testing instead of seeing how many features they can cram into a zip file they would be incredible applications.

I think this about almost every program I use (cursing all the while) with a few exeptions (the Modx Manager, PhpEd, older versions of Quicken, WordPerfect, WS_FTP, etc).

The current object of my wrath is TaxCut online, the designers of which should be drawn and quartered.

Bob

Quote from: chinesedream at Jan 22, 2008, 07:19 AM

Perhaps you can show us your masterpiece and enlighten us how to make IE 5 and IE 6 works exactly like other advanced browsers? Better yet, teach us the proper web development so that we can all catch up to your standard.

Excuse for delay.
I cannot show my site. It while is not present in the nature.
There is a good stuff with introduction in a problem about advantages of elastic design. Look here: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/elastic.

Good luck!

There’s a lot of people with a lot of real-world experience that say the idealistic goal of a completely elastic layout leads to unmaintainable code. As I like to say, in theory purely elastic layouts should be done as a rule and without hesitation. Also in theory, <insert favorite supermodel here> wants to bear my children.

The “elastic” template means, that the template behaves equally well under all browsers (and under IE 5, IE6, for example), and not just under fresh versions of browsers which know how to scale a text and pictures.
Using of units "em" is one of receptions of preparation accurate “elastic” template.

Look at your “creation” under IE6 attentively. The width of columns at font increase remains to a constant. Is it correct ?
Page makeup slides apart...

I don´t really get what this discussion has to do with MODx, but why not give an example of a MODx driven website which should be elastic enough for your requirements:

www.mademyday.de