how to manage thousands of child resources?

Hi,

I am new to MODx and really like the system’s simplicity and flexibility. And I am trying to convert a site on a home-grown system which has a similar approach to MODx but lack the coherence and completeness of MODx. I have gone through sevearl tutorials and have one question about the document(resource) tree:

The site will have continuously news items fed in every day. As I understand it, all those new items will appear under a parent resource, which will quickly accumulate to into thousands and become a management nightmare. In the home grown system, special pages are written to filter out list of items, but in the MODx back, there seems to be only one way to present the collection of the documents, that is by the tree.

Am I understanding MODx correctly: does each news item need to be a child resource item? are there better ways of organising MODx?

Thanks much for any pointers!

Alan

Well that is a method of managing content. If you feel like some programming you could code up something to store the posts in your own table and then have different pages to interface with that table. At least that’s what I would do if I had a large volume of updates and didn’t want a ton of pages. (and if I had programming skills outside of HTML/CSS)

Thanks for the reply. I suppose with Modx’s flexibility I should be able to just use the home grown content management page in addition to the MODx core system (haven’t figured out how to ’hack’ the /manager system yet but pretty sure it’s doable). I just wanted to check first to see if that’s not re-inventing the wheel lest MODx has other alternative of managing the content.

I would think a search/filter to list content items would be a much demanded feature, for any site with a reasonable amount of content.

I know there is the Site > Search feature in the manager so you can lookup pages based on ID and a few other items. You shouldn’t need to hack the core to do what you want with snippets and modules you can do just about anything.

Check out http://bobsguides.com/MODx.html it might help you some if you want to code up something for use with modx.

Thanks for the tip on the search function and the tutorial link.

I was thinking about dropping the whole home-grown admin system (php/smarty) into MODx, as an addition to the /manager UI. The simplicity of system seems to allow that (some minor tweaks might be needed), the home grown system is very similar in architecture and philosophy, but uses a set of different termnologies, and the database needs to be ported over.

Still exploring and playing with MODx. So far so fun. Such a breath of fresh air of using only as much as you need. Compared to drupal’s approach that you have to learn to drive an airplane in order to go to your bathroom..

I know there is the Site > Search feature in the manager so you can lookup pages based on ID and a few other items. You shouldn’t need to hack the core to do what you want with snippets and modules you can do just about anything.

...also have a look at the DocFinder Module by Bogdan if you want to manage thousands of documents http://blog.medianotions.de/en/articles/2008/modx-doc-finder-1.5-publication

-> Demo on trymodx.com | Login: demo_user / demo_user

+ there’s QuickManager for working directly in the frontend

Thanks for the tip on DocFinder. Had a look and it appears to be a search engine for the backend, which will be helpful. The frontend QuickEdit I was aware of. Yes, that would be very helpful too.

Why not organize the news items into subfolders representing the month or week or some other information?

that would require me to create folders automatically based on some attributes of the resources. I am sure MODx has the capibility of doing it but I haven’t learned it yet :-(

One main reason for me to ask the question is that this would be common problem for any site with a sizable amount of contents. I wanted to find out the "right" way to do it in MODx, or if there is already something built-in that I missed..

Thanks for the reply!