What would you like said about modx?

I was invited (or at least encouraged) to write an article about modx for the very popular tutorial site nettuts.com. I would like this to be an intelligent overview and touch on stuff that is less obvious to the average reviewer but essential to getting the most out of modx. We see other reviews that have a superficial view and us users can tell that the reviewer missed the key aspects. I pitched the idea and they liked it..now I have to deliver

So I put the question out to the team, what would you like to be said about modx that is often overlooked?

Template Variable are often overlooked so this is a must.

One of the best things about MODx for me, that’s not always mentioned in the articles, is the fantastic support provided by the MODx community and the positve energy seen here every day.

The other thing is the freedom one feels when working in MODx as compared to other CMSs. MODx has your back for just about anything you want to do and almost never says, "we’ll tell you how your web site should look and function."

Ditto to the modx community. Ryan and I talked about this as one of the projects greatest assets and attributes.

The other thing is TVs and PHx (Which really should be in the Evo Core). The immense power of TVs is something I have never ever read about in any modx article and is often missed even here.

Jay, think you could take a stab at creating some content for the new site that might start to do it justice?

Damn! Wrangled to another commitment. Like I’ve gotten all the other stuff done I said I would.

I can certainly work on something but my POV is in the use of TVs and PHx for preventing end user from screwing up the layout through thoughtful implementation of TVs with conditional outputs via PHx.

My feeling is that TVs should be used to ensure the user is filling in blanks and Never, ever required to style, position or control layout from the RTE. I’ve seen too many modx implementations and other CMS implementations where the site editor is left to edit HTML, places divs or use css classes to control output.

One think I can add to what has been said but it’s not a feature, it’s how MODx is built and how it works with you rather than against you.

Let me explain : most CMS (even good ones) slow you down and force you into a pattern. MODx does not.

This struck me hard when I had to work on a community website for my other half’s non profit organization : I wanted an out of the box system since it was pro bono and a typical-no-need-to-hyper-customize website.

Among all the YAPS Typolight was NYAPS (Not Yet Another Portal System) : it has a clean codebase, advanced permission management, handle multi-site and multi-lingual, has versionning, is easily templatable, has a clean minimalistic backend UI which is easy to figure out, a CSS framework which help out with the "block" system... etc.

I took me 5 days to build a website with it and learn it, but I must say that the process of working with TL is way less fluid than MODx : there are maybe 3 or 4 steps to go through when there is only 1 with MODx. With MODx you almost work like with a static website templating wise and that’s a time saver for conception and maintenance.

About the community, it also struck me when I got on board with Typolight : the english community is not very active (german community seems to be the core one, way more active and more posts). My only luck was to find someone expert and active at the french community... so yes that’s a key point which is often underestimated.