Hi,
I have posted on the forums a few times already, but have decided to formally introduce myself
My name is Fazal, my other details are in my profile. I have been designing sites for about 3 years now, prior to this studied digital and graphic design at London College of Printing. I am a Londoner born and bred
Anyway, I have used many CMS in the past, and the reason for introducing myself late was to see how much support a designer with not alot of backend code knowledge would be accepted. My advice, designer to designer is: Use MODX!
I played around with Joomla for a while, the admin GUI is nice, but when you try to get down to business, the first thing you find is that you have to learn alot of new odd and confusing quirks to get your design to work. The hype that Joomla got was initially the thing that got me interested in it.
I was playing with Joomla for at least 3 days before I understood how to integrate my HTML. Then for some reason it was churning out tables around my content. Unwanted garbage, I posted in the forums, and no one replied as to why this was happening and how I could fix it!
Suffice to say I looked around for a new CMS, then someone suggested having a look in StyleGala forums. Within 3 hours of reading the post, I had setup the whole CMS, integrated my own HTML, my CSS, and set up the content too. I have no real experience in PHP, I can read the markup and at best change a few variables. But thats all you need in MODx!
From a designers perspective, it’s always nice to use a CMS that seperates content from presentation as much as possible. The last thing you want is a CMS that mixes the two. And this should be the goal of a CMS, to MANAGE CONTENT.
The trend right now is to use layers and CSS, mainly to make the site more accessible, yet at the same time, adopt the semantic markup ethic, MODx accomodates this, my experience with others hasn’t been as successful.
The beauty with MODx is that you dont have to dabble much with your HTML bar the document variables you need to put in (how else would it work!), allowing you to concentrate on ironing out those CSS layout issues.
Moreover, its easier to isolate the problems because of this. If you place a snippet, or a chunk somewhere in your layout, you can spot where any issues may be.
I can’t speak for developers, as I havent broken it down from that perspective, but so far I am impressed with the simplicity and ease as to which someone can get up to speed using it and setting up there own site!
Great work!
And apart from that, I like Mixed MArtial Arts! I want to go into a competition one of these days
MODX Staff
