Hi!
I have just arrived to modx and I am very impressed of the power and flexibility it shows.
I don’t have much experience in either programming nor cms, but I have a quite precise idea of what I’d like to see in a CMS and I thought I’d let you know to see what you think.
My impression is that MODX is flexible and modular enough to do this and much more!!!
What I think that all cms lack is a really flexible and modular media manager. It should allow to upload, download, manage and show all your site’s content.
Nowadays, only partial solutions are available. For instance, there are picture galleries but they are just that when they could be much more.
For example, imagine that your current site design looks good with articles with 200px wide images. But maybe you change your design and find that now it looks better with 250px images and a frame... no simple solution. It would be nice if all the pictures in your site could be managed by a thumbnailer that supports templates, and you store somewhere the original images. Just edit the template and it’s done!
But if you have a thumbnailer, you almost have half of the work done for your gallery. Just make it modular and call it a collection manager. It would allow to group items and store data about them. Then call a modified version of NewsListing which outputs a selection of your collections of items and it pages them. These items could be mp3, pdf, images...
And a gallery is really quite similar to a file manager... How great it would be to see those pdf with thumbnails...
You get the point. A few flexible snippets that can be reused and combined could make together a powerful media framework.
This is how I imagine it:
- A thumbnailer: a starting point could be a wrapper for phpthumb, which is capable of handling many file types (not only images). Just allow it to use templates.
This thumbnailer concept could be extended to a "transformer": something that just outputs an item in a modified way. Think about having an item that is an audio file and being capable of offering it as a link to ogg or aac files generated according to templates. It’s really the same as a thumbnailer. Just add an option to the thumbnailer (or better in the template!) to choose if the output will be an image or a link to a file (original file or modified according to template parameters).
- A collection manager: group items in collections and add metadata to items, including permissions. Allow uploads of items and collections. I guess this is the hardest thing. Or maybe not as these entries could be MODX documents with custom TVs.
- A collection listing: Like Newslisting but for any item. Newslisting could be a particular case of this, in order to avoid duplicate code.
- A RTE plug-in to insert items managed by the media manager. Allow for browsing thru collections and select templates for thumbnails. A similar plug-in already exists, it would suffice to change it’s output to include the thumbnailer wrapper code and template selector.
Most of these things are already done in one way or another, but they maybe lack a little modularity and re-usability.
Well, just an idea.
Jaime.
