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    • 30765
    • 66 Posts
    We’ve been working on this for the past few months, between print deadlines ;-). Rolled out early this morning, local time ...

    http://idealog.co.nz/

    Idealog is a New Zealand business magazine about ideas, innovation and creativity. The original site was created two years ago with Joomla -- we had a list of requirements that pretty much only Joomla met, and as Mambo had won the previous open-source award I thought it was a pretty safe choice. Not so! Joomla is full of archaic, unexpected behaviours, the quality of the plugins is generally very poor and it’s very difficult to control your layout. It got us started quickly, but I won’t miss it.

    MODx, on the other hand, still has a few rough edges, but it’s a powerful and rewarding piece of kit. Now we have a base site that we can really build on. Thanks to the core team and to this very helpful and clued-up community. We had quite a bit of content in Joomla and writing a script to migrate it all to MODx was a pain, but worth it I reckon.

    Thoughts on the site are welcome ...

    Cheers
    Matt

      • 25663 MODX Staff
      • 12,272 Posts
      Love to hear more about how you migrated from Joomla (and would love to see the scripts too...).

      Love the design and the fact you’re using good photography. Looks like a very interesting site ... well done!
        Ryan Thrash, MODX Co-Founder
        Follow me on Twitter at @rthrash or catch my occasional unofficial thoughts at thrash.me
        • 3749
        • 24,544 Posts
        I like the look. Lots of energy. A Ryan says, the quality of the photos is great -- a really good compromise between quality and loading time.

        Your design is very wide and seems to be locked with respect to width. It looks great on my 21" CRT monitor.

        I haven’t actually tried it, but It looks like much of it would be off the screen on a 15" laptop monitor or even a 17" 4:3 monitor. This may be exactly what you intended but I thought I’d mention it in case you haven’t looked at it on a smaller screen.

        I also wonder how long it might take to fully load the sea of content on the home page across a dial-up connection.


        Bob


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          • 7231
          • 4,205 Posts
          Very nice site. Well done. It looks great on my macbook, no probs with the width or speed here.

          Looks like Ditto was a major tool.
            [font=Verdana]Shane Sponagle | [wiki] Snippet Call Anatomy | MODx Developer Blog | [nettuts] Working With a Content Management Framework: MODx

            Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is.
            Do you, Mr. Jones? - [bob dylan]
            • 10487 MODX Staff
            • 1,535 Posts
            Garry Nutting Reply #5, 19 years ago
            Great site, I love the look smiley Fantastic effort indeed!
              Garry Nutting
              Senior Developer
              MODX, LLC

              Email: [email protected]
              Twitter: @garryn
              Web: modx.com
              • 30765
              • 66 Posts
              Thanks for the comments. Letting the art stand up on the site was a definite aim, as the print version of Idealog has high production values and we have some great layouts to draw from.

              BobRay, the site fits well on my old 15" iBook, so it should be okay for most. But we tried to make sure it would be completely useable without the right-hand column. I found YSlow, a Firebug plugin, invaluable in trying to speed the site up (although there are a few tweaks I haven’t yet done). I wouldn’t expect many dialup users, but even then I think only the front page would be annoyingly slow (and aren’t they used to it!?).

              Ryan, I had intended to write the import script so it could be turned into a module, but it ended up quite customised -- mainly because of a couple of Joomla extensions we had installed. It probably would have been easier if I knew more about the MODx document model; the script doesn’t use MODx classes at all, and I’m sure it would be faster/more maintainable if it did.

              To prevent linkrot, we’re using the Virtual Aliases plugin. The migration script automatically populates a template variable for Virtual Aliases to do its magic.

              MODx has no concept of a writers’ byline, different to the person who put the story online, so we made a TV called ’Byline’ and again the script put the right value in there. (As a convention, I use camel case for TVs, so I can quickly tell what’s a TV and what’s a document variable.)

              There are a bunch of Joomla extensions for commenting; we used one called jom_comment. The script migrated the comments too, assigning them to the correct document and web user, but it would be specific to jom_comment.

              We just picked the contents of Joomla’s images/stories folder and dropped it into assets/images. Obviously, the links needed to be rewritten, but the script did that. It also changed local links to use the MODx [~id~].

              I also wrote some snippets for other functionality our existing site already did, such as embedding videos, a Flash MP3 player, etc, and converted the pages on import to use the snippets.

              Happy to share/donate/whatever the script; I’ll give it some comments and send it your way.
                • 3749
                • 24,544 Posts
                I think the embedded video snippet might be *really* popular around here. laugh

                It’s a great site and, from your description, some really impressive MODx coding.


                Bob
                  Did I help you? Buy me a beer
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                  • 30765
                  • 66 Posts
                  Quote from: BobRay at Oct 17, 2007, 11:30 AM

                  I think the embedded video snippet might be *really* popular around here. laugh

                  Itt’s pretty simple. It uses swfobject to load the Flash files with valid markup ... I noticed recently someone has done a snippet for swfobject’s successor, swffix (?), and it could easily be updated to do that.

                  VidEmbed takes two arguments: site, which is one of ’youtube’, ’google’ (video), whatever, and defaults to youtube; and v, which is the video id at the site.

                  <?php
                  if (!$v) $site = 'bust';
                  if (!$site) $site = 'youtube';
                  
                  // fixed params
                  $height = 350;
                  $width = 425;
                  
                  // defaults
                  $player = '';
                  $vid = '';
                  $flashvars = array();
                  
                  switch ($site) {
                  case 'google':
                  	$player = 'http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=' . $v;
                  	$vid = 'VideoPlayback';
                  	break;
                  
                  case 'ifilm':
                  	$player = 'http://www.ifilm.com/efp';
                  	$flashvars['flvbaseclip'] = $v;
                  	break;
                  
                  case 'revver':
                  	$player = 'http://flash.revver.com/player/1.0/player.js?mediaId:' . $v . ';affiliateId:0;height:' . $height . ';width:' . $width . ';';
                  	break;
                  
                  case 'bust':
                  	break;
                  
                  default:
                  	$player = 'http://www.youtube.com/v/' . $v;
                  }
                  
                  if (!$player) {
                  	$result = '<div id="' . $v . '" class="vidembed">Missing movie ...</div>';
                  } else {
                  	$result = '<div id="' . $v . '" class="vidembed">Loading movie ...</div>
                  <script type="text/javascript">
                  var so = new SWFObject("' . $player . '", "' . $vid . '", "' . $width . '", "' . $height . '", "6", "#fff");
                  so.addParam("wmode", "transparent");';
                  	foreach ($flashvars as $key => $value) {
                  		$result .= 'so.addVariable("' . $key . '", "' . $value . '");';
                  	}
                  	$result .= 'so.write("' . $v . '");
                  </script>';
                  }
                  
                  return $result;
                  ?>


                  $flashvars doesn’t really need to be an array, but I want the snippet to work with other sites when we need it.

                  Cheers
                  Matt
                    • 3749
                    • 24,544 Posts
                    Very nice.
                    Thanks!

                    Bob
                      Did I help you? Buy me a beer
                      Get my Book: MODX:The Official Guide
                      MODX info for everyone: http://bobsguides.com/modx.html
                      My MODX Extras
                      Bob's Guides is now hosted at A2 MODX Hosting
                      • 5091
                      • 332 Posts
                      Nice site and clean smiley I think this also is a strong portfolio of Modx grin

                      I see a little usability issue though. A site like this, every piece of stories/listings are fighting with each other for the real estate. the last two columns are too long, for the homepage they look fine as the left column’s content are long, when a user scrolls down, he can see the bottom section’s content; for other pages, where individual story is short, people won’t scroll down to read the bottom section, or worse, they won’t even notice it.

                      I see the bottom section’s contents are the same on each page. I guess your site hasn’t completed yet (?)

                      Layout for magzine and newspaper is a great challenge, it really test one’s skill on grid layout design. I wish one day I will get an opportunity to do a site like this.