I haven’t posted in here yet, so I thought I’d introduce my company and how we use modx.
Computer Solutions is based in Shanghai, China., and is a small web / IT support company with 6 employee’s.
We’ve made about 50 or 60 sites now in Modx, and the more I use it, the more I appreciate the underlying core.
We moved over from Drupal, and Modx essentially does everything better, and without the headaches.
For this project, the client wanted a catalog showcase for his products. Later on in the build process they decided that they wanted product details under a login.
Modx handles this easily using Document Groups.
We made it accessible automatically via client registration, but the client is a little paranoid about designs so now they manually add users.
Most of the cool product stuff is hidden under a login unfortunately, but there is enough to see without the login.
We used Ditto extensively for the site, and a lot of chunks for layout.
Ditto does the heavy lifting for most of the display, and although there were some minor glitches (some behaviour in Ditto changed between v1 -2), I’m happy with the site.
There is a little bit of custom code (using snippets) tying stuff together, but not that much. Maybe 4 or 5 snippets, mostly dealing with getting id’s.
All the data is done via tv’s in Modx database. We didn’t use any external tables.
Overall I’m impressed with how it came out. We handled the client changes easily, and quickly, and once again Modx proved itself.
Comments appreciated!
Lawrence.
-
MODX Staff
- 730 Posts
This is a great testimonial for MODx.
The site is quite slow over dialup, but since the market for this site is business users, that isn’t likely to be an issue.
Nice job. I always love to see different people’s ideas for organizing a catalog online.
Its a really tidy website, did you assign links to the flash once it had been compelted? and di you use a snippet to integrate the flash or did you use a ’chunk’ sorry i am pretty mew at this and trying to get a grasp of how you have done all this fantastic work!
did you use maxi gallery aswell in this or was it a different gallery mod?
Nice site, well done. Thanks for the description of your method and approach, this really helps get a grasp of what is going on.
@pirouk
We didn’t use anything except for Ditto, chunks, and templates.
(Plus some custom code for id’s and whatnot)
Flash is easily integrated.
We use friendly urls, and then hardlink the different folder names in the flash
so /Products/XXX would go to product line XXX
Fairly straightforward.
Flash we usually use swfobject to display. We also used lightbox in this project, but those parts are not publically viewable unfortunately.
All in all, once I worked out the kinks in how to do stuff, it became very easy.
We make a catalog style site probably once every three months, so now we’ve done the initial work once, redoing things becomes easier.
Modx is excellent because of its flexibility, and the ability to template as you want.
The weaknesses are things like front end editing for clients - you essentially have to roll your own methods to do things like easier data entry forms for clients.
Its not onerous, but it could be easier.
Access to external data sources is nice though, and easily implemented, which means integrating with other things is easier.
I’m still a big fan of Modx, after more than one year of using it.
I just wish I had more time to dabble in contributing some code, instead of just using it.
I guess my forte will be in protelyzing it..
