Greetings and first impressions from Scotland

Hi,

Ed’s my name, I live in Edinburgh and I have worked in R&D in networking and distributed systems for a *very* long time. Have not used CMSs up to now because I have never had a problem big enough to warrant the learning curve for the likes of Zope or Joomla, that has now changed.

A client wishes to have a CMS for some smallish relatively static product portfolio sites, e.g. list of products, one product per page. The client is a design consultancy and they want the CMS to fit their designs not the other way around. Of the FOSS systems I looked at, MODx seemed most suitable for a trial so we will be using it for a couple of simple sites to see how we get on.

I would also like to volunteer my services as a developer, I’d be happy to supply a CV to the team on request. My initial interests would be database (portability) and investigating how to publish static sites from MODx. I have no idea if these ideas are being worked on or even whether they are goals or non-goals.

First impressions are crucial and once we get up the learning curve we forget just what it was we found difficult when we started, I would like to pass on my first impressions as I go along, what’s the best way to do this?

MODx looks very impressive if you know what you are doing but how do I get started? I’ve read the documentation, there is a fair amount of it, little of it helpful with the "how do I convert my design to MODx?" problem.

What I would have liked is an additional tutorial on template building. Perhaps an annotated process starting with a html/css design for a simple site, then extending this to include dynamic content, e.g. "to include text content do this", "to include a picture do this". Then explain how the same page template can have different text or pictures when used for product A or product B. These are all the problems I have to overcome and I suspect its going to be very hit and miss as to whether I notice all the material I am going to need. However I am going to work through the basic blog tutorial and see where I get to, perhaps I’ll write the tutorial.

Finally, is there a published release timeline?

If of course any of this is just a matter of RTFM then please point me at TFM

Looking forward to being of help

Ed

Hi Ed.

Quote from: ed at Jul 25, 2006, 02:32 AM

I would also like to volunteer my services as a developer, I’d be happy to supply a CV to the team on request. My initial interests would be database (portability) and investigating how to publish static sites from MODx. I have no idea if these ideas are being worked on or even whether they are goals or non-goals.

OpenGeek’s the database guy but he’s always open to input. There’s a major db change due in 1.0 which I think should aid portability.
As for static sites, have a look at Adminstration: Export Site in the manager. This exports the entire site to HTML, which is pretty cool. It does open the door up to having a local CMS that creates static pages for a client, but I’ve not tried it. Certainly it could be extended to actually FTP up the files etc.

The best thing to do is to contribute a snippet/module/plug-in; many of the most commonly useful ones end up included in the released package.

Quote from: ed at Jul 25, 2006, 02:32 AM

First impressions are crucial and once we get up the learning curve we forget just what it was we found difficult when we started, I would like to pass on my first impressions as I go along, what’s the best way to do this?

Feedback is welcomed - find the relevant forum and post away!

A lot of stuff is undocumented because of potential changes in 0.9.5 and 1.0

You should look at http://modxhost.com/ for an introductory tutorial.

I think the hardest concept to get over, because it really is so simple, is how MODx handles templates. I assume you’ve been through the design documentation, as it’s really very simple. Also make sure to check out the link to modxhost.com... great stuff there.

1) Build a static mockup.

2) Replace the various content bits with [*content*] and [*template_variables*]. Template Variables (TVs) are essentially nothing more than custom fields that are assigned to each template. They would be a great for the replacement picture you describe above. There’s further some great documentation on them as well. When TVs get really fun is when you start combining them with @BINDINGS ... I’m not aware of similar capabilities in any other system.

3) Replace the bits that might be reused across multiple pages with {{chunks}} (I do this frequently with document headers and footers)

4) Use a chunk for a static navigation if it’s not going to change frequently, or use a call to a Menu builder [[snippet]] that will work for you (this is the trickiest part now). In the very near future, there will be a beta release of the menu building snippet that will be the default MODx menu snippet that makes this super simple and almost infinitely flexible to build your menu any way you’d like. More on that soon.

5) Copy, paste, then sit back and relax.

It typically takes FAR longer to build the static template than it will to make it work in MODx. One of MODx’s strength is how it spits out exactly what you put in it, and it’s one of the reasons why MODx was built in the first place!

Quote from: ed at Jul 25, 2006, 02:32 AM

I would also like to volunteer my services as a developer, I’d be happy to supply a CV to the team on request. My initial interests would be database (portability) and investigating how to publish static sites from MODx. I have no idea if these ideas are being worked on or even whether they are goals or non-goals.

Greetings Ed. I am in the process of refactoring the entire MODx core to be powered by a database agnostic OR/M layer which I have built from scratch. It’s not completed, and I would be more than happy to have some contributions to the effort, so if you are interested in getting your hands dirty in some code, feel free to contact me via PM after you take a quick peek at some of the documentation and code at http://xpdo.org/ -- again this is a project in progress, but I have used what is completed of xPDO itself on several client projects now, and the results have been very encouraging.

Quote from: ed at Jul 25, 2006, 02:32 AM

First impressions are crucial and once we get up the learning curve we forget just what it was we found difficult when we started, I would like to pass on my first impressions as I go along, what’s the best way to do this?

Just let us have it; we try to consider all user feedback as best we can. Of course, if you want to contribute to the documentation efforts officially, I’m sure the documentation team would love some direct help.

Quote from: ed at Jul 25, 2006, 02:32 AM

Finally, is there a published release timeline?

No release timelines at this point. Being an all volunteer army, we release as we can, and cannot really prescribe due dates for development tasks, that is until we can afford to pay full-time contributors/project managers for their efforts. However, I believe this too will eventually be a problem of the past as we continue to mold MODx into a sustainable organization.

Hi Ed, welcome to the community!

I think my fellow team members have given you enough starting points on your questions so I’ll keep this post short . Just to say, you’ll only have to convert one template to realise just how easy MODx makes it - if, like me, you’ve looked other systems in the past like Joomla!, MODx is truly a breath of fresh air.

See you around,
Garry

Welcome Ed!

Yes, there isn’t really any "converting" to do when slamming templates on to modx. Just need to replace the demo data with some TV and snippet calls. Take a look at the Mollio template package what I did recently and compare it to the original templates.

Have a happy time modx-ing!