Poking Around and Thinking About Switching But I Have A Few Questions First

Hello everybody;

I have been looking around the forums and the main modx site and am very pleased about what I see and hear. I am in a bit of an interesting dilema but I’m sure its been around since website development began. I have used Joomla, WordPress, Drupla, PHPnuke, PostNuke, etc and it just isnt cutting it to say the least and I dont have 6 months to completely hack up their code to make it work for how I need to use it.

I am currently seeking a CMS - how I am trying to use it is I have a master site in the root directory of my web server; this will display my main website but will also offer a link to clients (upon logging in they will go to a billing area, etc). In all my second level directories I have websites; some of my clients are wishing to have CMS added to their websites.

What needs to happen is when the person logs in they go to this billing / contact info page (basically a user control panel like you find on most forums) from there they have access to modify only their own website. This can be done in two ways:

1)The user is able to modify "posts" or "articles" which are installed in the second level directory websites via php includes. But this means statically (is that even a word) creating each page in those directories.

or my dream and hope of eventually modifying a CMS to

2)The admin(s) are able to create webpages when they log on(and define the template), define how many pages the user can have- thus dynamically creating the website in one of these second level directories. All content can be then filled in by the user or the admin(s).

So far the downfalls of what I’ve used that were deal breakers:
Joomla – you built the master site but the slave sites although dynamic were limited and unless you gave up control panel useage giving access to other websites you had to have “edit” buttons posted all over the users website. Content was not very organized and again website A could see website B’s content

Wordpress – not a very bad system but again without alot of hacking at the code users could see each others posts and it took alot of code modifying to change even the simplest of things. The way I set it up was having blank single post pages – when a user edited their post it updated their website. Problem is because they were static web pages it took alot of fiddling around if you wanted to add a new page.

Drupla – hated it. I wont go into more details but it was just depressing to say the least – after a week with fiddling with it to try and get it to do what I wanted I barely had made headway.

PHPnuke/PostNuke – great potential but again its a portal system so its great for what it was intended for but didn’t quite work for what I needed it for.

Basically for those of you who didn’t just read the novel I wrote I want to know just how achieveable what I am looking for is with modx before I start getting my hands dirty. I really don’t want to keep shopping around – I want one system that will work or can easily be modified to fulfill my needs (doesn’t have to match up entirely as long as it can be modified to fit). At this rate my last option is to build my own CMS – but why reinvent the wheel if you don’t have too.

Thank you all for your help in advance, I really hope this is the solution.
PK

Sounds like MODx Revolution will be just what you are looking for.

+1 what Sottwell said.

In Revolution, you can put each subsite in a different "Context." They’ll all run off the same MODx core (only one install to upgrade!) and will all be visible to you in the back end, but will be separate sites in the front end. Giving users CMS access would just be a matter of adjusting the permissions so they could log in to the Manager and see just their own context in the back end.

Using custom permissions and form customization, you could even customize the Manager for each user.

The only caveat I can think of is that the database could get pretty large if there are many sites with many documents.