Another sidebar content method using TV

I has been wonder about the same thing and this might just work to pull in the Nuke users.

Good thinking!

Quote from: rthrash at Sep 09, 2005, 09:48 AM

This might just become the basis for an "Emulating the *Nukes with MODx" tutorial.

That’s a great idea. Is anybody working on a "MODx for Etomite users" guide?

I think it would be great to have these sort of guides for some of the major CMSes. Especially for terminology.

"MODx for Etomite users"

Step 1: Install MODx on your existing site. Make sure to keep your /manager/includes/config.inc.php file and all of the files in your assets folder.
Step 2: Run the installer application, choosing "upgrade".
Step 3: There is no step 3!

Quote from: rthrash at Sep 09, 2005, 10:14 AM

"MODx for Etomite users"

Step 1: Install MODx on your existing site. Make sure to keep your /manager/includes/config.inc.php file and all of the files in your assets folder.
Step 2: Run the installer application, choosing "upgrade".
Step 3: There is no step 3!

I was thinking of consolidating a lot of the questions that a typical Etomite user might have about MODx. There may not be a lot of that sort of things now but by the time we get to TP4 and especially 1.0 I think there will be a lot of questions from Etomite users.

For example...
What is a TV (Content Variable)
What is a Module
What is a Plugin
Explaining the terminology differences.
What happened to Chunks?
What happened to weblinks (possibly)
What is a placeholder
What are Snippet Properties

Most of this info will probaly be found in other places but I think it would be good to consolidate it into one FAQ or something. It seems to me like we had something similar to this way back when, maybe when MODx was an Eto mod.

Hi,

Here how I think the ordering can be done based on Adam’s suggestion:

Create TV call SideBlocks (checkbox or multi-select) with the following input options:

Block A==[*BlockA*]||Block B==[*BlockB*]||Block C==[*BlockC*]||Block D==[*BlockD*]

Then create TV BlockA through BlockD as shown in Susan’s post but this time use a DropDown menu:

Quote from: xwisdom at Sep 09, 2005, 11:56 AM

Here how I think the ordering can be done based on Adam’s suggestion:

That’s not exactly how I had done it but similar. Your method has the advantage of only having to specify one TV [*SideBlocks*] in the template. I had skipped the SideBlocks TV and just listed the blocks in the Template



There are advantages and disadvantages to both ways. But either way you go I would highly reccomend putting your list in a Chunk so that you only have to change the list in one place.

So create a new chunk with the name BlockOptions and put your list in it


Then you can use Raymond’s same code but use @CHUNK for the Input Option Values as shown below.



Plus the SideBlocks should be a delimited list but not the individual blocks, right?

Well, I did this because there are some blocks that I want in the home page, and different blocks that I’ll want in each page from there, and some pages will have some of the blocks that the home page has, so a "home alone" snippet wouldn’t work. Plus, there will be blocks with content in different languages that will get attached to the appropriate pages. All using the same template. It really simplified things, and I thought was a good use of TV. And perhaps I should mention that this system will actually be used by my non-programmer partner as soon as his ADSL line gets put in and he can start doing something with his site. So I needed it to be as simple and obvious as possible.

All of this discuss about block get to think back on when I migrate from various CMS to Mambo is that I was presently surprise when I found out that Mambo let me selectively choose whether the module (or chunk in modx) to be display on a particular menu item.

This way when a user click on a particular menu items the whole site layout will change base on that setting. This feature allow me to change the look of the site base on the user click. It is so flexible in the regard and is so unique in Mambo which I have grown to appreciate very much!

I also liked Mambo very much, and Xoops as well. Unfortunately it was going to be extremely difficult to adapt either of them to a multilanguage site, while it was quite simple with Etomite/MODx. A block-level content management feature will definitely be something to consider as the Project continues.

Susan,

In my opinion we will only take the part that we like from other CMS and leave behind the part that we don’t like to make Modx better than any of them.