My first ModX site

Here’s a site my wife and I have been working on for special needs families using ModX: www.specialfamilies.org.

Let me know what you think, good or bad. The site template is based on an Andreas Viklund one since I’m not a graphic designer!

John

Good job, I think it is pretty nice!

Maybe you could place the google ads a bit down into the white region or alter it to stop it from overwriting the background graphics with its own white background.

Thanks for the tip. I have been thinking about that issue but I’m not sure I know what the best answer is - if I move the ads down the page then presumably the CTR will drop. I don’t think Google allow transparent backgrounds, and putting the ads in their own bordered box is also not supposed to help the click throughs.

I’m sure I’ll come up with something!

Very nice design, congrats!

Blending the Google Ads is dead easy, look in the code they provided for pasting on your site, almost all colors can be customized.

FYI: I use Firefox and the ColorZilla extension to pick and paste color values...

I’ve found out how to change ad colours fine - that’s not the problem. The problem is that the ads appear on a part of the template which has a soft image on the background as part of the template, and the ads aren’t transparent so they just look ’stuck’ on. Have been experimenting with different ad positions but none that I’m sure about yet.

Nice site!
Do you feed in the "latest news" automatically? If so: how do you do it?
And your top-navigation tabs remind me of a problem I have still to solve:
Letting the tab which belongs to the current page appear different (i.e. as "active").
Could probably be done using "UltimateParent" or so...

Any suggestions/experiences with "tab-stats" anyone?

The way it is now you have no indication of the section you’re currently in.

I admit I have quite a long task list still to do, including sorting out the tabs. I’ve been delaying it because I’m trying to think up a better way to do the navigation. Currently an article can be under both the Information and Activities tabs, for example, which I do using document groups, so the ultimate parent idea won’t work for me.

Unfortunately the news items are just weblinks with the publish date set and Ditto feeding the information out. But it only takes a minute to add each one.

Thanks for the info!
Quote from: johnvb at Aug 11, 2006, 06:20 AM

Currently an article can be under both the Information and Activities tabs, for example, which I do using document groups, so the ultimate parent idea won’t work for me.

Aha. So it must be done by "remembering" the tab the visitor has clicked most recently.
Interesting, for me too, because I also like to file docs under more than one category.
No idea how to do that right now. More than just linking the tabs must post a variable. Smells like a SESSION-issue..
EDIT: or creating the navigation using a dynamic SELECT based on a category/keyword, like blog-software usually handles it.

Quote from: johnvb at Aug 11, 2006, 06:20 AM

Unfortunately the news items are just weblinks with the publish date set and Ditto feeding the information out. But it only takes a minute to add each one.

I thought so. Just another idea/question: how to display foreign RSS-feeds on a MODx site? I’ll see whether I find a snippet here or at least a PHP-RSS-reader which could be integrated in MODx.

I’ve got the PlanetPHP rss feed going on the site http://www.phpusers.org; I set that up some time ago and will need to get into it to see how I did it. I’ll get back here on that...

RSS reading, here it is:
http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,2366.0.html
NewsParserX