I was very happy to find ModX after much trail and error on other CMS’ and frameworks, including hand-rolling my own CMS in Asp.Net only to experience the pain of not getting I’m relatively new to ModX and to this forum. I was ecstatic to find ModX when I did and took the first chance I had to implement in it. I’ve been working in ModX now for a couple months. I’ve been hesitant to start asking questions here until I felt like I’d caught up a bit on the existing and previous discussions.
Thank you all for you parts in bringing ModX to be what it now is. After sniffing around this long I see that there has been lots of progress on v0.9.5 -- I’m anxious to see it.
We’re very near the first release on a site using modx:
http://www.fn-group.com/clients/diopa/modx
We chose ModX for flexabilty first and power second. We greatly value our ability to go from a Photoshop mock-up straight into the CMS implemenation with so little effort. We’ve chosen to use ModX on a site which would have perhaps been an obvious Mambo/Joomla or Drupal fit. However my exprience with these packages has been very frustrating. They are not flexible and they forced on me all sorts of features and functions which either didn’t really work or were simply not relevant to the project at hand.
Working close to the process and with a fickle designer I’ve had to switch-out the visual design 3 times in 3 weeks in the process of developing this site. Each switch took minimal effort in ModX, but I can’t imagine the trouble we’d been in if I’d been in the middle of a Joomla implemenation when I received those updated Photoshop mock-ups. No proprietary weirdness in the way. Great!
That’s a mouthful, but suffice it to say that ModX has served us well so far.
For what it’s worth, here are the key things that have gotten in my way while developing over the last three weeks (maybe I should post this part somewhere else):
1) The Manager is ug-ly, sometimes painstaking slow, and yes, functional. It’s clear that updating this is a priority item on the roadmap. There are several optimizations that could be made here which would speed-up putting an initial site together where, like with the visual design, where drastic shifts in content organization can happen.
2) FCK Editor -- I don’t see how to have it not mangle my code. I write straight XHTML and like to keep things tidy. FCKEditor compresses it if I leave it to a client to update. Due to the limiations of this and TinyMCE, without any other options, I can’t imagine setting-up a webuser for my client to directly edit or enter content. Eventuallly I’ll need to work-out something that feels right for them.
2) I abandoned a full TV based "Church Directory" for an external PHP file because of the architectural and practical issues involved with using the all-powerful TVs for such a purpose. I also created a custom calendar using TV’s and NewsListing but abadonded it as well as it seemed too inefficient to have my client use the Manager to navigate to folders to enter/update events. Ended-up just iFraming a Google Calendar’s fed PHPiCalendar which works fine for now.
3) DropMenu is a very important Snippet to allowing the flexibilty that we so much love in Modx, but I needed even more options to get it to style the Here Last occasion. Also, would love to see a way to apply a Menu Item class in a TV that DropMenu would spit out on the LI or A of that item. I may address this in a separate message later if necessary.
4) Documentation, more please
Loren
Philadelphia, PA
USA
(moving in 1 week to Questa, NM)
