My first Modx site

I’ve been looking at ModX for a long time, but I don’t think I was ready for it until recently. I say this because ModX at this stage is still a developer’s tool. Coming from primarily a design background, I had to familiarize myself with programming concepts in general, before I was able to "get" ModX enough to use it. Maybe other designers are able to just pick it up and make a site at first pass, but that wasn’t me.

The site here is a pretty simple one I put together for a client. It was formerly a static site that they wanted to be able to edit. Because it’s a simple site, it was a good one to get started with ModX on and it really helped me internalize the basic concepts of how the different TVs, chunks, and snippets work together. Once that happened, I found ModX very cool to work with. An important point is that the site now looks EXACTLY like the static version I put together, which highlighted for me how flexible I can be with my site design (with virually no extra effort) while sticking ModX in the backend. There’s nothing too fancy going on here. Just the usual suspects: Wayfinder, Ditto, eForm. I also used FileDownload for the Resources page and RandomImage for the header image of the internal pages.

Anyway, here’s the link: www.readytwolearn.com

Very nice site. Great addition to the MODx site gallery, as I like to call this forum.

It was formerly a static site that they wanted to be able to edit.

That is one of the things that I really like about MODx, it is not only for complex data sites and turning previously static sites into MODx driven sites is so easy and will make the site management a breeze. Just tooo cool, and it just keeps getting better.

Nice and clean site, congrats

At the bottom of each page I see empty content (below the footer). I’d try to fix that; no use in scrolling further down if there’s nothing to see

I agree with ganeshXL that’s a huge footer!

Quote from: bunk58 at Feb 26, 2008, 08:14 AM

I agree with ganeshXL that’s a huge footer!

Yeah -- you’re right. Is that a little better now?

Thanks a lot for the comments, everyone.

yep, that’s much better
however, lose the thin white strip at the very bottom (or add a strip on top as well, for balance + consistency)

Oops -- thanks for pointing that out. Fixed.

What I found is that after a few months I realized it was crazy to build any static sites for a small company because eventually they’ll want to add/change something and I don’t want to go wading through HTML to change a few words. It grows as your business grows but doesn’t make the end users head explode if they want to manage it themselves.

I once had a pro-bono site for a non-profit who was hosted on a free service with no PHP or database. So I set up a MODx installation on my local machine for them, exported the site once it was finished, and whenever they wanted changes that were more than just text on one or two pages, I just did the changes on my localhost and exported the pages again and uploaded them.

I think of modx as a designers tool rather than a developers tool, that said I’m glad the developers are here, making everything work!

I’ve just started a new job at a firm of architects, first thing I’m going to do is change the cms over to modx!

Nice site btw.

ss