Which input method superior or preferable, if either?

Hi All,

As a reformed newbie, I am having a great time, *shudder* (I’ve gotten allergic to learning in my old age, I think...), breaking down the details of how ModX works - from ten different perspectives, where stuff goes, how it is called, etc. etc. in order to understand the essence of the CMS.

One question I have not found an answer for as of yet. As with everything else in ModX, seemingly, there is always more than one way to do something, and once on a certain path, I suspect it is possible to work to what you want to do, regardless, to some extent, of which path one originally begins on.

My question regards how ’guests’ (who are not privileged ’admins’ or ’moderators’) can input data into the database. So say you have a site where people can rate a book, then they can also write some review text about the book. It seems one way to do this is to create the individual template variables for ’rating’ and ’review’, then to direct the guest to that web page to input their specific data - I am still not clear on how the original TV page is represented to someone who is not an admin, but I am working towards that. Another way would seem to be to use a form tool like FormIt, to create the form, then to output the data to the database somehow.

Is the answer that either way is fine or am I missing some detail, that these are two different sources of data, not meant to be intermingled? Is it just that these two data types sit in different tables? Does FormIt even allow one to store the data easily without having to write code to write and parse and input the data into the db? Is it that once the TV is created, the FormIt can be used to call those fields then send the data back to the db?

Thanks for any redirection to the relevant tutorial that explains this or for clarification of how the databasing functions interact with ModX and its pieces.

Robert

Hi Robert,

I don’t know FormIt, but concerning rating, have you heard about "AnythingRating"?
It could be useful to you.

Jot also might be useful; use a custom field "rating", with radio buttons in the form, then you can use that field for sorting and even in custom snippets to combine, count, or otherwise produce output based on that field.