Help Desperately Needed!!!

Hello everyone, while i am not new to web designing, i am quite a newbie with CMS. I have tried joomla, drupal, ezpublish...they are all cool but the problem remains for me, the learning curve. I have a project which i have to complete in 2 weeks, apart from being one of a really low budget i want you all to advise or rather educate me whether modx is capable of creating a website similar to http://beta.mnet.co.za/. That is not exactly what is needed but they are similar in terms of plenty media. Please read on, the summary of the project is this: it allows people to register for participation in an on-coming game-show. and site visitors will have to register in their category of choice(e.g. singing, dancing, cooking, football etc), they choose an audition center etc. The catch and my major challenge is that registration is paid but in the form of scratch cards/PIN which participant must supply while filling the form online and hence be immediately validated and notified. How do i create the PIN and batch code(which will be printed on the scratch cards to be sold) from within the CMS and also validate it there....am so confused cos i neeed to get this job done in two weeks as it holds a lot to better stuffs oncoming for me. Again, can modx achieve it? and is the 14-day timeline feasible? Please respond to me, thanks in anticipation. Any responses ormore questions can be posted to me here or directly on [email protected]
Thanks.

MODx can do (and do it darned well I might add), but by yourself ... in two weeks? Even IF you are experienced with working with content management systems, that’s an awful lot of content to produce in such a short amount of time. That this is your first project working with a CMS, I would be very reluctant to take on this project. But that said ...

You should recommend to your client that the site will be rolled out in phases: base site with most essential content first, followed with next level of essential content, and so forth. We always recommend this approach with unreasonably hard deadlines. It helps ease the delivery schedule and makes for a satisfied client.

Mike

I think you would need a bit more than 2 weeks for that sort of a project.

You will have to do a fair amount of coding for the pin system.

MODX is fairly easy for page setup compared to others I have tried and as you say with the others a steep learning curve. (not saying MODX is easy)

The guys (and girls) are great at helping out but you have to do the bulk of the work yourself and ask when stuck.

Ask me you don’t get chased away.

If you can produce your template page in XHTML it can easily be ’converted’ to MODX.

There are plenty of tutorials to help. See modxcms.com LEARN.

For coding you will have to use PHP

You Hosting Site will have to be up to the task not like IDOLS in SA.

A big consideration as all of SA is not into this techy stuff. Look at the Vehicle Registration 10 to 20 times the server capacity larger now than ’planned’ for. I don’t know how you can do this with a low budget. Cape Town City Council far underestimated the server size and network capicity for SAP.

Hope this helps a little.

I have assumed you are in SA (mnet.co.za)

Good look
Allan

Doing such a site in three months would be a push, IMO, especially when you consider the testing and the security issues. Learning MODx will take you more than two weeks and so, I expect, will the site design -- and that’s before any real content is entered and before the pin system is designed, tested, and implemented. I would want at least a month or two just to work out possible problems in the pin system.

You could cut the time down considerably and make things more secure if the client would just use PayPal or a credit-card gateway for people to pay instead of the pins. With pins, automated bots may be bombarding your site trying to guess the pins, and you’ll have to have a system for dealing with people who claim they bought a pin and it didn’t work. You’ll also need a system for getting the pins (presumably a whole lot of them) onto your server without anyone (including the printer) seeing them. You also need a way to make sure that unsold pins don’t work.

I don’t envy you.

Bob