Hi everybody.
I’m LC. I’m New. I’m an unter-geek : I understand enough to know how little I understand and am willing to learn but actually don’t know a damn thing about programming and site design and what have you. I just fake it well. That and sacrifice a goat occasionally while dancing widdershins around the motherboard.
(I kind of figured there would be an actual newbie question board, but can’t find one, so I’m putting this here. If it needs to be move, please feel free.)
I’m trying to put up a site for my mom, who is retiring and concentrating on her art now. She’d like a gallery and online store. I was teaching myself Joomla! to deal with this, as I had some contract work for a Joomla!-based site. I’ve been... underwhelmed. I’ve learned some things, but layout seems very constrained and the management is overkill for what is essentially a simple concept.
So, looking for options has brought me here. (I’m looking at a couple of other CMS’s as well.)
Is ModX a decent way to make an artist’s site like this? I want to take advantage of my mom’s visual sense to let her come up with a visual idea of what she wants the site to do and work backwards from that into how it needs to be presented. I don’t want to learn code from scratch, but I want to be able to understand WHY things are displaying and interacting the way they are enough to shape it how I want in the end. (And am willing to learn as I dig down.)
I’m hearing good things about ModX but don’t want to dig in only to find I’ve wandered down the garden path to a dead end.
Any thoughts for someone probably in over his head?
MODx is a great CMS, but not a good site design tool, if that’s what you’re looking for for your mom to use.
It give you complete freedom to design the site the way you want it, but you have to provide the CSS and HTML on your own (there are some pre-built templates available, but they’re not really part of MODx).
MODx does have MaxiGallery and some other snippets that make it easy to upload and display images (and some nice JS presentation for them) as well as good menu and content aggregation tools.
Hope this helps.
It does, thanks.
My understanding is that none of these CMS systems is a design tool. You deal with templates and that’s just the way it is. As far as I know there ARE no design tools for these things. (Content goes here, sites would look like this, this outputs to this part of the site.) Certainly not open source and available. As far as I can tell it doesn’t exist. You have to learn CSS from scratch and figure it out - there’s nothing that links a CMS system to a design or allows you to adjust them.
TBH, I’ve never looked. I assumed that there would be some decent open-source ones around by now. Maybe not.
That should make MODx that much more attractive, because it’s a dream to design in compared to other systems, IMO.
BTW, this is a MODx site:
http://www.npg.org.uk/
