Before modx, I made fire with two pieces of flint.
I used mambo and I created with 4 friends the website www.mambofacile.com and now joomlafacile.com. But; if mambo is friendly, it has several gaps : the lack of users magament, The management of the template is too heavy ...
I used Both Movable Type and Textpattern, but both are not so easy to customize as MODx. I think is the best tool I have used so far for building web sites through a CMS.
I built two production sites with Mambo/Joomla. Although I like Joomla, I don’t like the huge amount of time it takes me to build a site. Via a thread on the Textpattern site where a guy is very enthousiastic about Modx, I decided to give Modx a try.
I have installed it on my Kubuntu (Linux) system and played with it for a couple of hours and I am impressed.
Especially:
1. good SEF URL’s
2. Front site editing
3. excellent XHTML/CSS standards compliant
4. easier Manager GUI
I will now build a test site with Modx and dependent on my experience with that I might convert my two production site to Modx.
Keep up the good work!! Bee
Agree to that, I did use Drupal for a while, and given up due to the complexity in understanding the term and creating a template.
This is the first CMS ever that I ever contribute in making several addition to the system, due to the easy to use api, and resources. Guess what, I really like the way how the templating system work in this cms.
My attempt in adopting open source cms is always ended up as a disappointment, and ended up making my own cms from scratch.
Glad to know this CMS, I will love this CMS more and more
I started with Midgard (http://www.midgard-project.org/). It’s a "enterprise-level" open-source CMS. Midgard uses PHP as a scripting language. It’s a C program that needs it’s own patched version of PHP. (This has been the case in the past, I’m not sure about the current situation.) The lack of development in UIs is one of the worst problems with Midgard. On the other hand, it can be an extremely robust and stable platform once you get it going.
I just happened to have Midgard available on the server I was hosted on so it was the natural choise for a CMS. Later I landed in web developer job at a IT company that was using Midgard. I’m by no means guru or anything, just an average PHP programmer with some background with this CMS. But because of this background, starting with MODx was easy. Midgard uses content tree structure, templates with tags, "snippets", "chucks", etc. Some features are more advanced than their MODx counterparts, but I don’t want all the complexity and overhead that come with it.
I’ve tried to build my own sort-of CMS or "framework", but eventually got fed up playing with forms and mod_rewrite. (This is what I voted for.) Got as far as doing some sort of primitive versioning and using Text_Wiki as a input parser... I’ve looked at Mambo and didn’t get it to do what I wanted. I tried Drupal but perhaps on wrong project that needed something else. I was briefly with etomite, but needed the path aliases. So here I am.
MODx is my favourite CMS right now, and hopefully in future as well. It certainly looks awesome! Starting a new website is so easy and straightforward, and creating crude staging/live setup didn’t seem too complicated. "It just works."
MODX Staff
I’d spent a better part of my career looking for modX - and just recently found it.
The reasons I’m drawn to it are quite simple, valid content editable within xhtml css tableless layouts - you wouldn’t believe how many client’s I’ve come across who ask for a "table" to be put inside their ’beautiful’ tableless layouts because semantic markup with css is ’too hard’ for them to handle, or learn.
I mean, who else can say they’ve delivered valid (w3.org valid) xhtml css tableless sites to their client’s only to discover a week later it’s been transformed into a mutant of tables, errors, and layout components ’thumbing’ rendering issues and only working on IE6!
With modX, it offers a way to deliver layouts with a very easy logical means for client’s to manage content the way content inside css tableless layouts was intended to be manged -then there’s layout control, performed entirely via css and markup allowing the content to exist entirely seperate and primed for any css xhtml tableless layout.
But modX doesn’t stop there, it offers a lot more - chunks, snippets - the imagination runs wild!
I don’t think modX is an entry level cms, but then I wouldn’t call it ’just’ a cms . . . nor do I think it’s fair to measure joomla against it - joomla and mambo just aren’t in the same league.
Another awesome one:
aren’t these enough to throw a page on mainsite ? another idea is to display them in rotation in sidebar.
Okay, time for my two cents as a FRONT end dev. I absolutely love the Joomla community and the extensibility of Joomla, and it is a bit easier out of the box for a user.
BUT--
The core code of Joomla dictates to me, the front end dev, what HTML I have to use unless I want to hack core to make it work differently (not good at upgrade time, oh no! Not to mention that we’re talking about a great NUMBER of core files that would need to be hacked.)
It is IMPOSSIBLE to build an accessible website in Joomla. It is also IMPOSSIBLE to build a tableless website in Joomla.
MANY of the plugs/mods/mambots which, from one point of view are Joomla’s strength, generate TAG SOUP on the front end, causing huge headaches and angina to the front end dev- me. I find this to be a huge weakness since I have better things to do than hack around trying to get broken code to look good in all browsers (especially IE.)
The editors which are easily integrated into Joomla are also guilty of sometimes (often) generating non valid front end code, also adding to the above mentioned headaches.
Now, ModX--
On the downside- it’s a young application that’s not yet very extensible, though I’ve seen great improvement on this front since it’s been released.
It can be a steep learning curve for a strictly front end dev (I am so php challenged it is NOT funny.) However, if set up right, this can be a VERY easy application for the user despite what others have said. I’ve succeeded in doing that for a client, though my hair went half gray in the process . . .
On the UP side-
ModX NEVER dictates to me what html it will generate. I have complete control over the frontend. I can make my layouts SING in this web ap! And with minimal hacking to get things working cross browser since I am the one dictating the frontend code instead of the web ap doing so. Not so in Joomla.
The community here, though smaller, is EVERY BIT AS KICKASS as the Joomla community. Even better is the commitment here that I see to write an application that is totally capable of w3 and wai compliance. Actually, it’s already been written. Compliant websites are already possible with ModX (and have been from the beginning, I think) whereas mambo, and then Joomla have been talking about the "coming release" of their accessible version for well over a year now, with no release date in sight.
That commitment to coding excellence and forethought to the future extends into the extensions/plugins/mods/snippets/chunks made available through the community to extend ModX. Though I do admit that my use of ModX has been limited and there may be more, I personally have only found ONE snippet that generated non validating code (minor and I was able to fix despite being all thumbs with php) and I think I may have grabbed that one off the etomite site
The forum integration and other integrations, mods and extensions can’t come soon enough for me. I really don’t want to have to template to Joomla or the others since it’s so much eaiser for me to work with ModX. The couple clients I’ve had who are using it agree. It took them a bit of learning to use the admin interface to create documents, but I had them up and running editing their initially created docs within about five minutes with quickedit. They were tickled and so was I. Even better, with some wanking on the editor, it’s generating (mostly) compliant code and what noncompliant code is created has been put there by the client, so there have not been any whining from them about broken pages or stuff flying every which way in the layout. That makes me a VERY happy camper!
I’m still wondering why people say ModX is hard to use -- I STILL, AFTER HOURS AND HOURS CAN’T USE CIVICSPACE/DRUPAL. I can skin it- I just can’t use the SOB. And though ModX is a bit challenging for ME to set up, my clients, who, though reasonably intelligent are ’puter challenged, are loving this ap.
Hope that helps.
!