Hello folks,
I’m a CodeIgniter (a PHP MVC framework) "monkey", i’ve been developing a lot of sites/webapps with CI, lately i’ve been asking my self the question i’m sure a lot of developers ask "am i utilizing my time and efforts in the best way possible?" i’m a freelancer and i do not get paid on hourly or weekly basis but i get paid based on the projects/requirements i submit, and i do realize that comparing modx to CI in some aspects (or all) might be unfair or invalid.
I’m also trying to follow standards and conventions as much as possible to eliminate the need of rewritten code, but of course there is no such thing as 100% code usability, this is 100% true in the case of someone who was learning while coding at the same time, even though i’m familiar with OOP and i truly follow the MVC pattern aggressively in order to separate and eliminate "bad practice" in my development.
That mentioned above CI is consuming a lot of time (at least i think) and i am always questioning the end results in terms of portability and re usability, i truly don’t like reinventing the wheel specially in those very common tasks, such as permissions/security systems.
I’m sorry if i made this long i just wanted to give a background about my "problem" so my question again as short as possible would be:
Do you guys recommend me converting to modx? why and why not, or shall i stick to my CI web apps and try to come up with my own CMS based on my individual efforts (not implying though that this is an easy task).
thank you for reading and i truly need some opinions on that.
best regards,
Rami GB
Hi Rami,
I’ve personally been using modX only a few weeks but have done maybe half a dozen sites in that time using the CMF. I’m from Code Igniter and Kohana background, and loved both those frameworks, but I’m finding modX simply awesome.
One of the best things is the eForm snippet which makes setting up and validating forms a real breeze - thats a pig of a job and one I always hated in CI and Kohana.
Using chunks and templates separates the code into small and easily manageable blocks which is also nice.
I always enjoyed mySQL programming in CI/Kohana. Although modX can do all that I’ve found I’ve yet to need to do one line of database coding (although knowing database stuff and phpmyadmin is very useful in learning how modX operates in the background and stores info), and I’ve been developing pretty heavy product-driven sites. And strangely enough I’ve not missed it one bit.
The other problem I’ve found modX solved for me is that more and more clients are demanding control over their site content. Setting this up in CI was time consuming and hackish, and repetitive for each site. Modx rocks for this!
I can’t offer you much else as I’m still learning modX everyday myself, but I can say the initial couple of days I spent getting to grips with modX has saved me untold amount of time and be thoroughly worthwhile. And this is coming from someone who always hated what CMS represented (bloat etc) and really did not want a bar of them!Hope this helps....
Murray
