www.f-i-n-p-a-g-o.com (remove dashes)

www.f-i-n-p-a-g-o.com just went up!

Remove the dashes. I modified this so that it doesn’t show on the top of the search list.

I was recommended Modx from a friend and haven’t really looked into others like Drupal and Joomla.
I’m an old-school coder (started in 1995) and got out of professional web design in 2000.

I was asked to create this site from an old co-worker, and I decided this would be the first time I would use a CMS, and the first time I would use CSS for layout instead of tables! I a lot of my time debugging CSS layout between browsers!

The timeframe was tight, I started the project last Wednesday, and they wanted it live by Monday of this week. Had to wait until today to work out their content issues.

Switching to CSS design felt like the old days in 1995 doing everything by hand (slicing in photoshop) and refreshing in the browser. Dreamweaver 8 doesn’t do a very good job of rendering CSS. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why my menu was flickering. I ended up using the IE css to render a green background in the menu so it doesn’t disappear. Not ideal, but time was of the essence. Oh how I hate IE. It really hasn’t changed much since I quit designing in 2000. I was a table layout guru, but I wanted to be a good net citizen and try to do things right ;-)

What I love about Modx:

• Installation was EASY and fast! I had an error at first, but it was because all the asset folders were not uploaded successfully via FTP. Cyberduck sucks compared to Transmit.
• I basically used one template (except for the news section). So much easier than coding the site all in dreamweaver and doing sitewide search and replace! Where was this back in the day! BTW, I haven’t been living under a rock this whole time, I use Pixelpost and Wordpress for personal stuff ;-)
• In the template, I referenced the banner as [*alias*].jpg (and just named my banners accordingly.
• But since the news articles can have different aliases, I couldn’t figure it out how to use the parent directory of news as the banner using my example above. So I just made another template with news as the static banner. I was thinking I could solve it with a TV, but I with so little time, I didn’t have a chance to get a grasp of what TVs really do.

News - uses main template [*alias*].jpg = news.jpg for banner
-- article 1 - uses news template (news.jpg) was hard coded
-- article 2 - " ditto and so on..

The random research clipboard on the right is basically a random quote php script I grabbed from the web and made into a snippet. Love that flexibility!

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the flexibility of Modx, but here are some observations:

• Documentation seems pretty sparse. I lurked the forums to get the answers I needed. I still haven’t figured out how to correctly use the news section.
• The site seems really slow? I think it is Dreamhost because it seems to go down a lot! There was a static page home page (coming soon), and that would go down. Dreamhost seems to have some issues with uptime. However, I had Modx installed on an ESX VM, and it runs slow as well?
• I like the Admin area, but hate the interface. Too windows centric. I’m mostly a mac user (actually use both). In Safari, the save button requires a double click?
• I recently looked at Joomla’s admin interface on the demo site, and it would be nice if Modx would graphically represent the menu index.
• I couldn’t get Effect.toggle blind to work to reveal FAQ answers. I got JS warnings saying that Effect.toggle wasn’t defined, but I saw that that the prototype and scriptuous were loaded (I could see my popup content editor)
• Can anyone else tell me how I could balance those quote columns without resorting to invisible characters? I’d greatly appreciate it!
• Does anyone know of how to collect user info through the forms? Would the built in registration work? How have other people collect their user information?
• I was using the Sendtoafriend snippet, but it gives an error in Windows IE?
• Wish there was an easy way to have the client manage their images.
• I was using li in dls, so my site isn’t validating. But I’m using the built in menusnippet. Any suggestions?
• Not many templates out there, but I created mine from scratch. Looking at Mollio and the default templates helped me figure out how things worked. It would be nice if there were some video tutorials posted through.
• Overall, I think Modx is good - if you have a good understanding of PHP. Pure designers may find it difficult to use since the documentation is sparse. But this forum has been a great help!

Thanks for taking the time to take a look and read my ramblings! I look forward to 1.0! If I had more time I probably would have implemented Modx better, but Modx came through for such a short development time!

Thanks for the very insightful and thorough post about your experience... and great job on the site!

Some follow on comments:

[*] The manager interface/skin is definitely changing. My personal goal is to have it working much better even in Safari for 095 which is shaping up VERY well right now.

[*] TVs are your friend. I suspect that one day they’ll "just click" for you. @INHERIT in a TV for example is my favorite technique for making super-fast-to-adjust layouts now, but ones that can be easily overriden on a page-by-page basis. @BINDINGs absolutely rule.

[*] Can you explain the "visually representing menu index" like Joomla!? You can sort the menu tree by menu index so ...

[*] For forms, eForm (parser version) is definitely the way to go... It’s truly wonderful and supremely flexible. I use it for the payment/shipping form at http://corganics.com/store.html (and also the testimonials collector at the same location)

[*] Have you checked out our documentation (particularly the designers’ guide) and the getting started tutorial at http://modxhost.com/?

Nice website, its look and feel didn’t suffer from the tight time schedule you mentioned, good job!

I noticed a little "bug" however: If Home or news is clicked in the navigation the sorting of navigation items differs from the others. Probably some different menu snippet call due to the usage of slightly different templates like you mentioned so its probably easy to fix.

Thanks for your responses!
Here’s an easier way for me to explain what I’m looking for and what I think newbies may find easier.

When creating the menu alias and show in menu, there is a menu index option.

How about duplicating the info in the menu on the left using some nifty ajax?
When you click on a page or folder, you can press an up or down arrow to adjust the menu index.
So there would be a view "menu view" where it would show as it would in the menu (hide invisible pages).

I used to work for Computer Associates and we sold a product called CleverPath portal. To sort the menu, there was a list window of the sitemap, and you can simply re-arrange the items by selecting the menu name, then using an arrow on the interface, move the item up or down.

I simply love the concept of dynamic menus. I’m thinking of using ModxCms for my Photography website

Templates.
At first, I was intimidated that there were not that many templates to choose from. From a designer standpoint, the examples on http://modxcms.com/template-basics.html didn’t look as compelling as the examples on the Drupal site. The concept is there through. Maybe in your marketing section of your site, select your best users’ sites and provide screenshots. Many folks doing initial research on a CMS may not dig this deep into a forum. But ideally they should, so they can see what kind of community support there is! And from what I see, it is really great

I know when I was looking, I was looking for a site with the similar features that I wanted to implement. So if I found a site that worked great, and had what I was looking for, then I would dig into what was running it. Because if it worked for them, maybe it can work for me too.

I didn’t choose Modx on popularity (only about 900 or so ratings on http://opensourcecms.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=2101&Itemid=159. I did because a friend recommended it, and it seemed new enough that maybe Modx is addressing the frustrations from the older CMS products that have become "set" in their ways.

I liked what I saw here:
http://ajaxian.com/archives/modx-cms-an-ajaxphp-content-system
Because I saw that a lot of experienced Drupal and Joomla users were switching. I wanted flexibility in a CMS, and I believe that is what Modx is providing.

When we were selling the Portal, potential clients loved the fact that our product shipped with 15 or so templates that they could easily customize. I think that is what makes Wordpress popular too (besides its ease of use).

I know that there are a bunch of open source templates here.
http://www.oswd.org/

But if Modx included at least 5 templates in the distro, it may help get folks on their feet a little faster. Although I can design my own, other folks may be looking for something to start their small business, a community site, etc. Modify first, then port later. Even though porting is VERY easy once I understood how it worked. I had to install the Mollio template to understand how everything tied together.

Here’s what I suggest (If at all possible)

• Template with 3 columns, ajax search built in
• Template with popout submenus
• Template with a couple more "ajax" like examples, maybe lightbox for images, comments fade in like K2 Wordpress templates
• Template with different graphical banners for each page
• Template with rounded corners, gradients, and other trendy web 2.0 elements
• A calendar of posts

Using Modx for news:

• Is there a way to modify the post date of a news item?
• Is there a way to modify who posted the news?

I apologize in advance if this is the wrong forum for suggestions. I just have this fresh off my head as a brand new user to Modx. Again, Kudos to the team working on this. I understand it is a lot of hard work.

Are there any security concerns as with Drupal and Joomla?