whitehead-monckton.co.uk

Hi guys

http://www.whitehead-monckton.co.uk

This is a site I designed a few years ago for a mid-size UK law firm, and I have just replaced my own rudimentary content manager with MODx. There was a fair bit of work involved in extracting many hundreds of articles, people profiles etc from the old database tables and inserting into the MODx tables - the only frustrating thing I discovered during this process was that MODx tv date fields are stored in the Gregorian style (dd-mm-yyyy), which makes sorting trickier than it could be if it was just a unix timestamp or the standard yyyy-mm-dd that SQL can manipulate directly. It would be great if this was changed in future releases .

In terms of snippet use, I ended up using Ditto tagging for the people department listings, which allows people to listed in one or more departments. I hacked AjaxSearch to make it behave like an OSX style live search field and to make it generate standards compliant markup. I wrote a snippet for the submenu which invokes Wayfinder, so that I could have 2 or more submenus at once without introducing another level that would mess up the friendly url scheme. I ended up writing my own SQL for the news/article listings which have particular behaviours that I tried and failed to achieve with Ditto (such as auto-population of the year filter dependent on the date range of article publication dates ) - although I’m sure it could be done if I’d had more time. I used FileDetails for article file links. Finally, eforms proved to be brilliant for the forms.

Thanks again to the MODx devs and community!

Sweet site. Very nice clean design (I am a sucker for clean design). Thanks for the description, I always like to know what goes on under the hood

I love the design as well, very nice and clean. And I really love the search!

Very pretty, but I do have one question; how does one close the search results block?

There’s a small x icon in the search field.

Very nice site indeed. Love the mushrooms etc. at the top.

re: date format
I prefer using my own custom TVs to just insert mysql-style date or datetime. It’s true, filtering and sorting gets much easier that way.

Ah, I’d completely overlooked that! Very nice search field indeed!

Gorgeous site indeed. Search for "tax" ... a word contained on the front page though: no results.

Guess that’s because mySQL has a 4-character minimum length for FULLTEXT search. You have to change some system vars to alter this.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-fine-tuning.html

Quote from: ganeshXL at Feb 07, 2008, 08:44 PM

Guess that’s because mySQL has a 4-character minimum length for FULLTEXT search. You have to change some system vars to alter this.

Yeah that’s always bothered me about fulltext, however I had no idea you could change this in mysql - very interesting! Thanks for letting me know, now just need to persuade my web host to change it...

Well, actually... there’s a little (simple) trick how you can still use <4-char-strings for search.
Simply check the string-length first: if it’s < 4 chars, perform a LIKE(%’$searchTerm’%) query, else do a regular FULLTEXT search.
Not pretty, but in cases where changing those system vars is not an option, perhaps a viable alternative.