Better date based resource management

One of the weaknesses of MODx is the missing ability to deal with large numbers of time-based resources like blog articles. Resources are always strictly tied to the page tree where they are sorted by menu order, even if menu order doesn’t make sense here. Plus: How handy are 600 resources within one site tree container?

For blog articles (and other similar pieces of content) it would be nice to have a solution for a better administrative handling. This solution could consist of several things:

1. A plugin which automatically creates year- and month-based folder in a certain section of the site tree and sorts all resources there by date. Everytime you save a new resource with a certain template, the plugin will tidy up those site tree things for you.

2. A separate module for organizing the blog articles in a detailed list view. This would include sorting and filtering by different parameters, a full text search, and bulk editing. There was something similar in MODx Evo, called Doc Manager, right?

We have to make it easier for editors to handle even large amounts of non-hierarchical content. Do you agree?

Interesting post, and a valid point. The Japanese community in fact created a custom Resource view for a Container in Evo that hid its children from displaying in the Resource Tree, but that still uses the built-in Resources with a grid of documents on the parent Container.

http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,42566.msg255370.html#msg255370

I don’t think you really need the auto-creation of Containers honestly, as output Snippets could take care of the categorization by month. Adding a search to the grid view would be relatively straightforward too. Just needs a custom Resource type which should be straightforward in Revo. That being said, I’ll see if I can get Shaun to comment on this further.

Of course, the proper way to do this really would be to use a custom database table, but that’s not always practical and sometimes overkill. The benefit of using Content + TVs mean you get to use all the added snippets that already know about them, but not about the custom database table (Simple Search, Wayfinder, getResources, etc.).

You are right: If we could just hide the children of certain containers, we don’t need a monthly archive in the page tree.

And I would love to see this draft from Yama as a proper Revo add-on! What do you think? Should we use the chance to make MODx an excellent news/blog-system, too?

I’ll take this as a challenge and gonna try to build my own Custom Manager Page with sorting and searching of numerous resources.
If it comes in handy, i will publish it as a transport package. Might take a few weeks, though...

We actually discussed this in my office recently. The lack of proper large volume document management forced us to choose dotCMS instead for a future project (Wordpress wasn’t even a contender). Personally, it was a bit sad since I really like working with MODx, but what are you going to do?

So, are there any official plans in the core dev team of addressing this in the future? Maybe a plugin with custom tables is the way to go, since a high volume blog with 10,000+ posts might introduce too much overhead if they were to be stored as regular resources? Just to clarify, I did not mean to add anything like that as a core feature!

A few days ago someone tweeted about a plugin that did pretty much what the TS mentioned as option 1.

http://modx.com/extras/package/autofolders

some times ago I made a CMP on basis of xdbedit to manage thousands of news in custom-tables.
its easy to filter and search on different criterias also by month, year, category, context or what not.

there is no need to change the CMS for that task.
Modx can handle this kind of stuff very flexible, when you know how todo it.

perhaps its better to discuss in this forum than in your office

Quote from: Mark at Mar 24, 2011, 03:36 PM

A few days ago someone tweeted about a plugin that did pretty much what the TS mentioned as option 1.

http://modx.com/extras/package/autofolders

Very nice, this Autofolders thingy! I’ll give it a try now.

A few days ago someone tweeted about a plugin that did pretty much what the TS mentioned as option 1.

http://modx.com/extras/package/autofolders

I have thousand articles and the autofolder addon partially solve my problem dealing with large posts.

I guess the resource tree should not show non-folder (non-container) resources. Instead of redirecting page to edit a resource, it's should displaying the search page and the resources child of that container (or context) when left clicking container (or context) in resources tree.

That will solve our problem.

Nah, I'm using Bable for handling multi-languages site. Autofolders can not handle that because only applied for 1 context.