Advice needed - is ModX for me?

Hi all,

I’m about to embark on a new client web project which, unfortunately, has a small (especially considering their needs) budget. Initially I thought I’d just go with WP, but I’ve heard good stuff about ModX so wanted to see if it might be for me.

The site will be a basic brochure site, so content pages will be easy. There are a couple of more advanced features, however:

1. They want an events calendar, where people can see what events are coming up and can fill in a form on the event page to let them know they will be attending. Obviously I need the calendar / events to be managed from within ModX admin area.

2. They want two email newsletter / mailing lists. The first, a general "latest news" email, the second an "upcoming events" email. They will both needed to be in custom designed templates, so I want my client to just be able to input the text in the ModX admin area, and it will send the email out in the template. Obviously, there needs to be a subscribe system, just through a simple form on the site. There also needs to be an easy unsubscribe option in the email.

With WP, there seems to be a good choice of plugins that will do all of this. I would like to use ModX though as I can see the site developing in the future. Considering the budget and so lack of funding much dev work, are there any modules or add-ons available that might make this possible?

Cheers!

To me this too sounds like a WP-job. This can all be accomplished by WP plugins and without much programming work... Just be clear to your client that any adjustments to the plugins cost extra. Don’t fool yourself by thinking all the default stuff will meet their demands Changing the plugins is hard most of the times because the code can be a mess. I would go for WordPress, show how the default plugins work & look and tell them that future enhancements to the site may cost more, because of WP’s architecture.

If you do insist on using MODx you can check for plugins at http://modxcms.com/extras/

You can also think about porting the WP plugins to MODx...

This is absolutely doable with MODx. It all depends your MODx skill set and you client preferences. Of course it’s not so plug and play as with WP but with MODx you can easily customize everything you need without hacking.

- Events calendar: Easy Events http://modxcms.com/extras/package/?package=118
- Newsletters: TXNewsletters http://modxcms.com/extras/package/474

There are other suitable snippets for requested features too but I’ll recommend these.