need to Learn to Crawl ..before i walk !

Hi everyone,

About to download MODx and install it on our server when my technical guy comes back from holiday.

We are venturing into web services and are looking for a CMS to build our customer web sites on.

We’re not developers or designers (yet !), we just think we might have the ability to learn

i hadnt heard of MODx until last week, and we were looking to use wordpress/thesis and customise it.

Must have read good things about MODx and the community.
Any views on whether we have made the right choice in choosing MODx



where do i start ( i’ve bought the book { the only 1 !] )

and...does anywhere actually sell good PREMIUM MODx templates for us to play around with

hopefully be speaking to you all a lot in the future

thanks for any help in advance

Jack

There are some great tutorials to get started. Part of the beauty of MODx is that it doesn’t force you into doing things a certain way. You create the templates (though there a lot in the templates library / extras if you wish) and the css files.

I tend to work like this:

• Create the page as if I were creating a static HTML page.


• I then have my css file and my HTML template
• Load into MODx the template and load the images and css file to the server
• begin replacing sections with the snippet and chunk calls where I need them

If any of you have experience building websites I think you’ll find the learning curve isn’t as long with MODx. I started out with Joomla, Drupal and WP, and they were tough to learn to customize.

I am a photographer primarily, secondarily I am a web designer.
That said I have found Modx to be the best cms for someone with web design skills and a basic or even non-existant understanding of some programming.

With an understanding of HTML and CSS, modx has some learning curve, but it’s totally customizable in function and appearance of a site once you grasp where certain files are for the css tweaking.

If you do not have any web design knowledge (html and css), jumping right into modx might be skipping a step or 2.

The community is great and the forums have been my key to getting around anything I didn’t understand, but there aren’t too many 1 stop learning resources that cover all the details. After you get the basics, you have to know what you need answered, and then search for the solutions.

For basics, here are 2 other sites that I found very helpful:

http://bobsguides.com/MODx.html
http://sottwell.com

There are plenty more you can find by looking at the sites run by members of the community, which you can usually find by looking at comments in the forums and looking into member info pages that usually list their website.

good luck

MODx is the one.

You don’t need templates. You can use any HTML page as a template; just replace the content and dynamic areas (such as forms and menus) with the appropriate MODx tags.

There are a few sites that I would recommend over the book (I will not say any more about that!) and I’m sure others will have their favorites as well.

http://bobsguides.com/MODx.html
http://modxrules.com/
http://codingpad.maryspad.com/
http://sottwell.com/modx-from-the-inside.html

I have several pre-ported templates available here http://sottwell.com/templates.html (you don’t need the SkinGraft module, it’s just convenient if you’re using lots of templates on a site)

More here
http://modxcms.com/extras/repository/packages/site%20template
http://modxd.com/
http://www.tattoocms.it/templates.html

Don’t bother with the templates you’ll find for sale on some "professional template" sites; it’s far too easy to modify any HTML source page to MODx, and these are no different than getting some nice free templates and modifying them yourself. My site linked to above walks you through either modifying an existing template or creating one from scratch.

Good advice here...

If you are going to build custom sites and create templates then you must have a really good knowledge of CSS. If you look at any branch of modern web design you will find that the common structure building block is CSS.

My procedure follows the same path that JWMSales presents, although I always start with a rough sketch and then build a home page with Photoshop (using layers.) Its a good idea to build the basic pages as static XHTML pages. Become a code snob and use as clean markup code as possible. All of the presentation should be handled by your CSS. Try to use Strict markup and make sure it all validates and gets tested with different browsers. Once all is good you can then pour it all into MODx. PHP skills are very handy as well. But there are a lot of successful MODx designers who have very little programming skills.

Most of the other CMS platforms have a huge template system available for people to download. That is convenient but most of these templates are all very similar in structure. Thus the majority of Wordpress sites look like, well, Wordpress sites. My main admiration for MOD is that it is so flexible to design for. Any design you come up with can become your template. With other systems you have to make sure the template gets along with all the underlying code structure. I like the fact that MODx templates get designed from the ground up in most cases.

Thanks for all the advice guys !

I’m AMAZED that i have had 4 responses in a couple of hours.
Thank you ..

I have posted on forums before asking basic questions, and have been treated as an "outsider", or an idiot.
Not the case here at all.

Your comments have made me feel very welcome.

i am not a coder, but i think i have an eye for design.
My right hand man is pretty technical, with css, html and php, and i really want us to get to grips with MODx, with all your much needed help.

I had heard good reviews about MODx, and the community, and this is a very confident start.
We will look to use all the advice available from you guys and any recommendations you make.

we will post our progress as we go

thanks again

Jack

I am pretty new to MODx myself, having only tinkered with it for the last two weeks. I’m finding that it is fairly simple to break up my static HTML pages into templates and chunks. A decent knowledge of PHP and JavaScript definitely helps to customize the site (if only to understand what the snippets and plugins are doing), but it is nowhere near the level you often need to "hack" other CMSs to get them to do what you want them to do.

Even though there is a bit of learning curve, MODx outshines other CMSs with its flexibility and lack of "required features"... it can be as simple or as complex as you need it to be. This is particularly useful when creating CMSs for non-technical clients.

If the site you’re creating right now doesn’t have need for much flexibility or customization, I’d still recommend using and learning MODx because it leaves your options open to future improvements and new websites.

Well, you’ll be a very useful part of a complete design team. I’m not too bad at development, but I can’t design anything. Working freelance on my own, that kind of limits my usefulness. I know when I see something I like, but I can’t imagine it before I actually see it.

People have kindly mentioned bobsguides.com, but I wanted to call your attention to this section on porting an existing site to MODx. It’s not comprehensive or detailed, but it gives you an overview of the process that might be helpful to you.

http://www.bobsguides.com/porting-your-site-to-modx.html

Welcome to MODx.

Susan Otwell’s site is the place to start. It’s a shame more people aren’t busy documenting how to use MODx as the system is superb.