The following is the first draft of an idea for transmitting MODx to someone who doesn’t know much about it. It’s taken verbatim directly from an email exchange I’m having with a certain tech industry guru that happens to share names with an alternative input device...
This could be a great regional country-specific marketing micro sites:
Background
We started the MODx project out of frustration after a multi-year search for an open source CMF (Content Management Framework). We needed a solution that would allow us to quickly build clean XHTML/CSS sites and web applications (i.e., a sensible, robust and extendable API without extended learning curves), and that also worked as a great marketing-site CMS. While MODx began as an add-on hack of Etomite, we ultimately found ourselves in the "interesting" position of having to choosing between forking the project or abandoning over a thousand hours of work. We chose dinnerware.
Since then, we’ve significantly enhanced the API and rewritten much of the application. Our 1.0 release will launch as a ground-up rewrite from scratch, and will hit private testing next month (see below).
Why MODx?
There’s a few things that people relay are part of the reason behind their choosing MODx:
- Simple templates -- build a page and replace the content parts with some simple tags. No complex template system required, and XHTML/CSS sites are dead simple. Converting existing sites is typically very fast, too, taking 10-15 minutes for a basic template port.
- Unlimited hierarchy -- it never made sense to me that you can’t build sites as deeply-nested as you want in some system. MODx has no such restrictions.
- QuickEdit front end editing -- log into the manger, surf your site, and click the edit buttons that appear when you want to make changes.
- Template Variables (TVs) -- you can have as many custom content fields as you want for your site with TVs. They can also have "widgets" attached to them to create things more easily like data grids, select boxes, pop-up lists and so on. (even questionable things like scrolling marquees as well...).
- @bindings -- this the USP for MODx, and most powerful aspect of the system. It allows you to bind virtually anything as the input source or the default value to TVs. Can be a logic evaluation, an API call, a flat file uploaded to a specific directory on your web server that’s then parsed into a data grid, an RSS feed, a file listing in a directory, or pretty much anything you can dream up... combined with the output transformation widgets this is really powerful.
People also talk a lot about the community. I’ve been a part of other projects that are run by prima dona control freaks that typically wind up with failing communities, or major bad blood -- just not pleasant places to participate. I try to keep the MODx community and actively solicit feedback and outside contribution; there’s no not-invented-here syndrome at MODx ... the "community vibe" is pleasantly different according to virtually every person that’s migrated from other projects.
The Unblog/Anti-YAPS Paradigm Shift
The way I see it, a blog is just another bit of content, usually with commenting attached to the end. It could just as easily be a series of press releases, articles, software downloads, FAQ questions, songs, podcasts or ... you get the point. The problem I have with most systems out there are that while they’re typically pretty good blogging platforms, you’re stuck with a certain "look" and you’re basically screwed if you want to deviate much from a blog site.
MODx’s "unblog" tool is really nothing more than a tool to summarize/serialize other pages stored on the site. Our comment tool is another little "snippet" of code, that appends the comments as a child page of the original article.
Similarly, the whole YAPS syndrome is out of control. Most CMSes I’ve run into I classify as such: Yet Another Portal System. Have fun sorting out a site that doesn’t fit into their blocks/channels/"insert lingo here"/whatever paradigm.
MODx gives you total freedom to build sites like you want, and there’s typically 3-4 ways to get to the same end result. It’s about total flexibility and bucking conventional patterns of website management software.
Example Sites
Some notable example sites:
Music, media and tech:
Sports & Politics:
Institutions & Organizations:
Businesses:
The Future
In addition to maintaining our current capabilities, our 1.0 roadmap includes:
- the ability to define Dublin core metadata to any resource, or any other metadata structure someone might adopt of need to model for a specific purpose.
- usage of native or PHP 4 emulated PDO -- the new db standard for PHP 5.1+, which supports SQLite, MySQL, PostreSQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server, ODBC, etc., (We will initially only provide a MySQL optimized implementation for 1.0, followed by other implementations as they can be completed).
- lightweight PHP4/5 compatible ORM with RAD features and run-time persistent class generation
- full and automatic content versioning with rollbacks
- multicultural content services that take advantage of the automatic versioning and rollbacks
- backwards compatibility with existing code base and API
- and a lot of other Enterprise-level features wrapped in a nice, usable interface
External Articles & Reviews
Some links to external reviews, resources and articles about MODx:
Selected Quotes
Heard around the web:
Excellent software. I have been able to do more in just 10 minutes with Modx then I did in several hours with any of about a half dozen other CMS’s I’ve tested. I’m HTML savvy, CSS average, and a php beginner, but Modx makes it easy to create a totally custom page using my html and css skills and then add content as needed. Loving it! -- Jeffery
sweet...php--oo--ajax ooo la la. -- Gregg from Romulus Design Group
MODX Staff
