My first MODx client site launch

I’ve been tinkering and learning MODx for 8 months now. I’ve used it as an add-on news system for an existing site, and also to start a couple of other projects which are still in the can.
Today, my first full-on MODx site was launched.

http://www.worldwideworkforce.net/

It’s a straight-ahead corporate site built on version 0.9.5

HTML
The HTML is *nearly* valid 4.01. The designer needed a layout trick which could only be employed in quirks mode, so essentially the site is valid 4.01 but without the doctype declaration. I learned that QuickEdit will not work in quirks mode, so I have the template output the doctype if the viewer is a manager user.

TVs, Chunks, Snippets and Plugins
6 TVs are helping me manage layout parameters, including allowing Designers (a manager group) to update various images outside of the content via QuickEdit.
There are 22 Chunks used as templates and configuration variables for various snippets.
I’m using Ditto, eForm, NewsPublisher, WebLogin and 9 other custom snippets.
I used the brilliant EditArea plugin so I could code faster. QuickEdit, TinyMCE are in use. Another minor plugin, a "collaboration" with another forum user turns the XHTML output of certain snippets into HTML 4.01.

Overall the site makes heavy use of some standard snippets. I wrote my own snippet to manage the image-based navigation state, and most of the other custom snippets were just to make subtle tweaks in user interaction that won’t be apparent on a casual click-through.

In the end, I spent a lot of time digging around for documentation, then searching in the forums, and lots of time in source code. I am in a better position to do a site like this again, probably in 1/3 the time. I guess the move towards documenting in the wiki is a good idea in theory, but it’s pretty under-utilized and currently contributes to the maze when trying to answer a particular question. It has made me realize how important user contributions are. I hope to be able to step up and help with that in 007.

Cheers,
Mike (aka netProphET)

Quote from: netProphET at Feb 01, 2007, 01:46 PM

Today, my first full-on MODx site was launched.

http://www.worldwideworkforce.net/

It’s a straight-ahead corporate site built on version 0.9.5

HTML
The HTML is *nearly* valid 4.01. The designer needed a layout trick which could only be employed in quirks mode, so essentially the site is valid 4.01 but without the doctype declaration. I learned that QuickEdit will not work in quirks mode, so I have the template output the doctype if the viewer is a manager user.

Nice site, congrats. At the first glance, I could not see, what layout-trick your deigner used. Would you care to eloborate? I am just nosy ;-)

Friedhelm

Sure, it’s a 100% high table, which makes the content area stretch down and lets the footer sit at the bottom of the screen.. unless the content grows beyond the fold. I looked into ways to do this with valid code and CSS, but I could not do it (and the budget didn’t allow me time to really explore for long). I found ways to acheive something similar, but not this behaviour exactly.
100% high tables don’t work like that unless the browser is in quirks mode. Since the layout engines do it so easily in quirks mode, I though there must be a way to do it with valid code.. if anyone knows how, I’d love to hear it.
Thanks for your comment, holliwell.

I believe this is what you are trying to achieve:

http://alistapart.com/articles/footers

Thanks Jesster444. I’ll tinker with this information the next time this layout problem comes up. I’m not crazy about CSS hacks, but this is still very good information to have on hand.
Cheers

Sticky Footers is what you’re looking for, where it sits at the bottom of the content or the bottom of the viewport, whichever is longer: http://www.themaninblue.com/experiment/footerStickAlt/

Thanks Ryan

Well.. looks like I get to make use of MODx’s Site Status = Offline on this one for now. At least I have a couple of other sites in the can that I can show off soon enough ;-)

make sure that your doc type is XHTML 1.0 Strict when using "sticky footers" as Ryan mentioned. or it won’t even remotely work.