Proper Documentation!

Before any new features get added, please spend some time on the documentation!

The installation instructions are good, but after that you are on your own. After installation, there’s nothing on basic *usage*. Just a basic walk through of adding and publishing a couple of documents would be nice.

And another thing, I can’t believe "how did it all start?" is really a frequently asked question. How about useful, practical things like "how do I add a new page?" or "how do I link to another page in the site?", or "how do you change the order of items in the navigation menu?" or "how do I see visitor number stats?" etc

MODX is obviously a well thought out and robust framework, but it’s being seriously let down by the docs.

Believe me, the docs are constantly being added to and re-worked but it’s a huge job, especially since the framework is still evolving.

Much of what you’re asking for is here or on the MODx Wiki (see the link at the top right of this page), although not always as easy to find as one would like. Also, take a look at MODx 101 - http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/board,221.0.html

Since everyone here is a volunteer and MODx is, after all, free . . . the most useful work is often done when people who’ve just figured out how to do something create some docs explaining how to do it.

Feel free to contribute . . .

Bob

http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/Frequently_Asked_Questions#General_stuff

Better?

There aren’t any built-in visitor stats for MODx. http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/Visitor_Stats This was the first link that resulted from a Search of "visitor stats" in the menu bar above.

And http://www.modxcms.com/editor-documents.html was the first result from searching on "new document".

Thanks for the replies, and thanks for not getting hufty about criticism like this. It’s only because I really like the look of MODx that I find the patchy documentation to be so frustrating. It’s such a common thing for amazing community-built systems like MODx to just not do themselves justice in this way.

Feel free to contribute . . .

I will, as soon as I figure it all out

But... the basic how to stuff needs to be on the Getting Started page (http://www.modxcms.com/getting-started.html). As it stands, you get to the end of the installation and then you fall off the end of the pier Perhaps add a link to the MODx 101 forum too? (as a sub-forum of the support forum, which is itself off the bottom of the screen when you first open the forums list, it doesn’t exactly jump out at you)

Good points ! Indeed adding those links will help newcomers no doubt
Keep shooting suggestions !

Documentation is good at a technical level but it is lacking at a user example level, no doubt about it. I hear that a lot of effort is going into documenting v1.0, but that is another story.

I found that the best way to figure things out was to install the demo site on a local server and just let it rip. I keep a few sandbox installs on my local server and work things out, test snippets, and general hacking (if needed). The demos site has some good examples of how things are done. The 2nd most helpful thing was the MODx for beginners tutorial in the wiki (as well as other wiki articles). And definitely this forum, I think that the lack of hands-on documentation makes it so that the community is much more helpful than most other user communities I know. Believe me there are some things that you just need to ask, but this is no excuse for not searching first

To link to a page within the site use [~xx~] where xx is the id of the page you want to link to (the id is in () next to the doc name in the doc tree).

BTW, welcome to the club.

Actually documenting will drastically evolve as of 0.9.7, you won’t have to wait 1.0...

Maybe something like http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch09_The_Blank_Slate.php could help in order to get newbies on board after installing MODx!