Online documentation is missing a lot of information.

This page (http://modxcms.com/template-basics.html) says, "Let’s examine a simple, two-column template." and includes the code with explanation for creating the template.

Then it says, "Here is a simple CSS file to control our template’s appearance:" and it includes the code WITHOUT an explanation for creating the stylesheet, saving the stylesheet, nor any information about how to attach the stylesheet to the template.

Am I just caught up in my Dreamweaver world and missing something obvious?

Quote from: DorianJ at Oct 20, 2006, 12:47 AM

This page (http://modxcms.com/template-basics.html) says, "Let’s examine a simple, two-column template." and includes the code with explanation for creating the template.

Then it says, "Here is a simple CSS file to control our template’s appearance:" and it includes the code WITHOUT an explanation for creating the stylesheet, saving the stylesheet, nor any information about how to attach the stylesheet to the template.

Am I just caught up in my Dreamweaver world and missing something obvious?

Perhaps. MODx is a content management tool for web developers and designers that want total control of the output of their site, especially the (X)HTML markup, and the CSS used to style the markup. This is something traditionally very difficult to achieve with most open source content management offerings. Though we certainly don’t discourage tips, tricks, samples, and free/open-source templates from being shared within this community, it should be clear to all users of MODx that the purpose of the product and this community is NOT to teach users the skills they will need in (X)HTML, CSS, PHP, or Javascript to create a great web site, but rather to help guide users in how to use the MODx framework in conjunction with those skills to facilitate the development and life-cycle management of a web site or even a small web agency. You can use MODx to prototype, create reusable sets of components you can make use of in future sites, deploy a small marketing site while you develop and full-features intranet site tailored to the needs to the project, or just make it so your sales manager can update a small section of your site without destroying the really nice layout and styling you painstakingly crafted to exacting web standards.

In any case, there is a new wiki for documentation that has been started recently; perhaps someone can clarify any MODx specifics with regards to the process of linking to style sheets some more there. But there’s really no tricks to including or creating stylesheets for MODx. They are just regular CSS stylesheets like you would create and include to style some good markup you created in Dreamweaver (source mode of course). And the default content installed with MODx includes a template with a great examples of how to link the CSS in with the proper paths and such (just always consider yourself in the root of the site when working on a template).

I hope that helps clarify why the documentation does not go into more detail about the CSS used in that example.

In any case, there is a new wiki for documentation that has been started recently;

It is already growing fast. I was there two days ago and then again today and already there are many additions.

Am I just caught up in my Dreamweaver world and missing something obvious?

Dorian, It depends on how you have previously built websites with DW. If you are building sites using it as you installed it and in Design Mode you may have a bit of a learning curve to using MODx and many other applications that use modern layout styled by CSS vs. font elements and tables. It is certainly possible to build your page in Design Mode and then go to source mode to grab the html for the page and insert the template elements into it but DW out of the box has historically had the CSS inserted inline. This can prove to be code heavy and doesn’t fully take advantage of the use of external style sheets. If you go into preferences it is possible to have all the rules you create placed into an external file.

I have to agree with Open Geek that this is a web developers’ CMS not a WYSIWYG Designer CMS. Personally, as a standards based developer who has developed a strong framework for my own client sites and see how I can easily integrate the two this opens up all sorts of possibilities.

Thank you, OpenGeek and smashingred.

The way I make my sites in DW is to make a tableless layout with html and link it to an external stylesheet. Both of those are the foundation of my template and the template is reused for each page.

Do I need something like a general CMS tutorial? Something to "reprogram" my head into thinking in CMS terms rather than HTML/CSS/static web pages.

It’s not so much a CMS tutorial as it’s a general understanding of how dynamic pages (content stored and pulled from a DB) differ from static pages (content embedded in the page). In my experience it takes a bit of time to jump for static web pages to dynamic pages.

I don’t think you could learn this through a tutorial, it’s more learning by doing IMHO (at least for me that was the case). Of course, a general understanding of what php and MySQL do can certainly help...

I’m very familiar with PHP and MySQL -- the entire LAMP combination in fact. I’ve been using it for a good 2-3 years now.

Basically, the fundamental function of a CMS is fairly simple: take a skeleton template for your HTML layout, ideally it should have no visible content at all, then plug in various elements in the HTML containers to make a unique page. These content elements are stored in the database (in some cases in the filesystem), and are controlled from a manager page.

In the case of MODx, we use document variables (such as [*content*]), "chunks" for commonly used bits of HTML code such as a footer content block, "snippets" for displaying the results of PHP code, template variables which are pretty much unlimited in what you can do with them, and a few other odds and end that are inserted into your skeleton HTML template with MODx tags. And we have the Manager for controlling it all.

MODx is far more flexible than just about any other CMS, which can lead to confusion at first. But once you get an understanding of its nature, the possibilities are pretty much unlimited.