Indication of cost: convert website to ModX

Hi MODx community,

I run a small sustainable consultancy and architecture office. I have always done everything myself, but things are getting too busy to continue to do so with several volunteer jobs doing things I’m really got at rather than website making. So, I come here with an inquiry for a price/time indication to get some help converting our current (straight HTML) website to a MODx driven website.

The website is this: http://www.except.nl
It’s hand-made in Dreamweaver, but it’s failry consistent in its design, layout and so on. There are quite a few pages on it, and there’s a few flash utilities that get their stuff from XML files that I wrote.

What I would like is:

To have a site where the layout is automatic when I want to post a new project. So, I give it the text in Dutch and English, the images, and the system will make the appropriate thumbnails, place them on the overview pages with links, wrap the text in the columns properly, add the XML file for the flash loader and make the flash-loader images, and so on. Basically, minimize manual setup time for new projects.

I have an idea of how much time this would cost myself to do. There’s no real time-pressure on this, it’s more important it would need to be done well. I’m basically the only full time empolyee now that we’ve been hit by the crisis, so we don’t have oodles of money floating around either (unfortunately).
I would like to then be able to do the maintenance myself again. Also, if the content needs to be newly added, I can do that as well.

If anyone’s interested, please respond here with any questions, and I hope to be able to answer them.

This might give you some perspective: http://bobsguides.com/porting-your-site-to-modx.html

Dreamweaver sites are usually not too hard to port because they already have templates and editable areas which correspond fairly closely to MODx templates and document content/template variable fields.

If your pages are peppered with PHP code, however, it can be more time consuming since all PHP has to be moved into snippets.

There’s no PHP in the site at all as it is. So, that’s an advantage.
The downside is perhaps that it does not use any Dreamweaver templates at all. I learned HTML the hard way: in notepad, and I still tend to design my websites like that: tons of tables. So, what you see is what you get, the HTML source is what I work with as well. No templates, nothing of that kind so far.
Of course I use existing pages to model the new ones. I also think many of the exisitng pages could be modified quite easily.

The link you give is nice, but reasonably useless for this website. Have you looked at it? It’s fairly complex, and there’s no such thing as a template. There’s quite a few different page types, and then there’s the flash XML, the image thumbnail generation, the popup script, and so on.

Bob’s site is still valid, granted it’s focused on more basic layouts, but the concepts still apply.

I looked through your site some and while complex it can be done. Clearly you would have a few different templates, but I don’t think it’s as bad as one might think. The real problem I see coming up is that your site is a table based design. They can be done using modx, but I have found css layouts tend to workout much better in the long run.

Flash is easy, xml can be generated by modx, thumbnail generation can also be done (http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,19236.0.html). popup script... I am guessing you mean JS code which is nothing special.

AMDbuilder

Thanks for the pointers.I’m sure it can be done as well, and that it’s not that hard.
Hence this message. Are you interested in doing this?

Some more details about what I would want from a MODx conversion, if anyone is interested in the job:

For the website, I would like to have the following abilities:
- Automate page generation. This would include automatic wrapping of text for the columns, writing the XML for flash based on the images indiacted, making the thumbnails for a different set of images, and adding the page with thumbnail to other pages
- Easily publish newsstories and so on
- Allow feedback/comment areas underneath / in projects
- Easily change language, but also have pages that are just in one language (but still available to other pages that do have mutiple languages. I will accept copy-pasting things if necessary into another language-page to prevent breakage or something)
- Quickly fix typo’s (I do make quite a few)
- I want our articles to be able to be publishable in RSS form.

The website currently has an uploader page that I use personally to send things to the server for clients to download. However I want to make a dedicated client area where clients can upload files, and I can put stuff there for them that only they can see, with username/password and so on. I do not ask of you to make it, but it should be possible for me to do so in due time (eg the framework should easily allow for such a thing).


Basically I see there’s the following ’kind’ of pages on our site:

- The main page
- The three primary subcategories (of which http://www.except.nl/consult/consult.html is the most representative)
- Typical project page (http://www.except.nl/consult/NederlandCO2040/index-nl.html)
- A-Typical project pages (we can change these to be more uniform, if necessary):
Example 1: http://www.except.nl/consult/urbantransportreduction/urbantrafficreduction1.html,
Example 2, http://www.except.nl/lightwave/RadiosityGuide96/index.htm
Example 3, http://www.except.nl/consult/largescaleurbanargriculture/largescaleurbanagriculture1.html

Please note that the website has an irregular design at the moment. I am in the process of making a slight overhaul. There’s this kind of old page (http://www.except.nl/design/torontochapel/index.html), and this kind of new page layout (http://www.except.nl/consult/DordrechtDuurzaamheid/index.html).
I want to stick to the new layout.

Quote from: except at Jun 29, 2009, 12:52 AM

Thanks for the pointers.I’m sure it can be done as well, and that it’s not that hard.
Hence this message. Are you interested in doing this?

Yes, I am interested, but sadly I am unable to take on any further jobs at this point in time. I currently have six projects lined up so the best I can offer is some advise here and there.

AMDbuilder

I can do everything you want. I’ll send you a message with details.