Idea - Gallery of commercial modX sites

When promoting an open source CMS solution for a commercial website there are usually two main issues I have overcome with clients (and sceptical creative-collaborators):
1. The belief that CMS sites all look like portals and don’t have any design flexibility.
2. The belief that open source CMS is for hobby or community sites.  [ There are whole lot of issues tied up with this: security, reliability, scalability, etc]

A great tool to help get around this is a commercial site gallery (such as the one promoted by Mambo at http://www.mamboserver.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=94&Itemid=123 - nice frienldy URL that one 

Lets get one kicking - with a link direct of the home page eg.  "Who’s using ModX?  Have a look at some recent samples of professionally developed commercial sites here>>"

I’d be up for setting some criteria, and helping pick out some samples.  But then again, I’d want to get one of my sites on there so maybe I’m not the best person to drive this!

Regards

Richard

Feel free to drive away Richard. Good idea.

And a link from a decent PR site like modxcms.com shouldn’t be objected too, I’d think.

This is a very good idea Richard

Personnally I think resistance to opensource will more likely come from corporations, not SMEs (at least, those I sell opensource CMS don’t have such concerns). They (the big Cs) tend to lock too many things under a tight leash, and are more often than not staying in the field of "business-as-usual" to paraphrase the dear Cluetrain manifesto... But let’s get back on track with your idea...

First, the thing you’ll need, to start a gallery, is not only enough MODx based corporate websites (at least 10, possibly more, this can be discussed...), but also websites with nice & clean designs, strict standards compliancy would be a definite plus. What would be nice is for people who have done / are building corporate websites to share with the community and announce them here.

Second, your idea gives me another one : build a MODx websites gallery grouped by category (corportate, blogs, webzines, communities...and so on). That would not only advertise MODx as being a credible platform for corporate websites but make a point about its versatility : as I said before to me MODx is a tool enabling you to build websites based on your users/clients needs and NOT from a locked, pre-defined use (blog, portal, news...).

Right now I think we should start by building a list, inviting people to share their MODx website adress (which I guess is the point of this forum), and prepare for a future gallery.

I for one will certainly use MODx for corporate projects, but I expect to have something tangible (a working corporate website) by the beginning of 2006.

I’ve got probably 10 or so sites I’ll toss in the ring.

While I’d love strict compliance, I see a lot of benefit in a more flexible approach. Some designs are damned hard to achieve without tables - for example I refuse to use faux columns...the hack is uglier than using tables.

If I get you right Ryan, you are suggesting running the gallery on a different URL? I’d prefer on the official site, but another URL is OK....maybe under the "new" name.

Anyway lets start listing some live sites in this thread.

Ryan - do you want to put your list up here? The VertexWorks site for a start....

Richard

ricardosanX, tables are OK as long as you don’t use them for layout... even forums now are beginning to turn tableless (see Unclassified News Board for instance).

Which design do you find hard to build without tables ?
I guess it’s a question of habit... anyway, with CSS3 there won’t be any reason at all to use tables

Anyway, I was just making a suggestion that would seem coherent : since MODx features page list Strong Web Standards Support, let’s not make the devs lie by using non compliant xhtml. That would be bad advertising

While I am here, there is one thing I wonder : how do you manage strict compliancy when using a WYSIWYG editor that will most likely cause at least one validation error ? Luckily with MODx editors are plugins, thus the compliancy claim won’t be challenged and we will be able to offer Markdown or Textile...

The thing I find hardest with CSS layout is equal column heights.

I’ve found a few hacks
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fauxcolumns/
http://positioniseverything.net/articles/onetruelayout/equalheight
http://www.jonra.com/css-demos/equal-height-columns-js-3.html

but they are not pretty!

Richard

Definately a good idea.... but surely the design, look and feel of the site and it’s ability to look nothing like a bog standard CMS is far more important than whether it was made with tables or not? A business doesn’t care how it’s made, as long as they get the look they want.

My sentiments exactly. I am far more interested in whether the design works than if it is "semantically correct" or not. I don’t hesitate to use tables if the design will work better. For example, I use tables for forms such as the contact form. How else are you going to nicely space and position the label/prompts and the input fields...if you have a multilanguage site and are using variables for the text, you cannot use margins or padding to space the elements, you don’t know how wide the text is going to be!

This template was proving almost impossible to work with in IE and other browsers, so I used a single table with two rows of two columns each. It’s even "source-ordered" in a non-graphical browser.

http://www.sottwell.com/home.html&template=5

@richard : true, equal column height with dynamically generated content is tricky. but their are ways to do it to make it look like identical height columns (repeating background are one element). I don’t really see a problem there, it’s a question of habit and it’s easily overcome. I don’t know any other way to do it. I don’t use tables except for tabular data.

@both:  Standards compliancy means nothing to a business in itself, agreeds: but it does mean faster loading times, easier maintenance, better accessibility, and no doubt faster re-design (efficiency is far better here) and well you might not care about semantics but search engines do more and more...

As I said, CSS3 will bury tables with the advent the Multi-Column Module.

But to get back to the subject : my point was coherence with the feature list...