Is MODx right for my site?

Hi All,

I’v just come across MODx whilst searching for the best solution for a CMS Website and just had a few questions which I’d be grateful if anybody can help with!

I’m launching a site for a niche industry sector, which will contain manually aggregated news, resources and white-papers (pdf’s) from industry solution providers. I want to be able to create the site myself and manually input the news articles, media items and documents (which will ideally be in a directory format). I also want the site to be a registered user site (with ideally the function to demand registering upon clicking on articles from the homepage) and allow comments from users on all articles and media.

Could MODx support this? And if so, could somebody with basic technical knowledge (I’ve built static sites with Dreamweaver but am neither a web developer or programmer) be able to do this with some learning and hard work? My specialities are in the commercialisation and editorial of sites, however I’m launching this site with the aim to be able to achieve this all myself!

Any help would be great.

Thanks,
Adam

Yes, this sort of site will be very easy to implement with MODx.

Hi,

Thanks for getting back to me.

So to clarify, a non-technical user could BUILD the site using MODx?

Thanks.

That depends of your knowledge about web.

the main thing is starting with the basics to build a page, because you need to understand the behavior of modx like any software and know were to put the files in the right place and things like that, may be you going to spend a lot of time starting, but after that, ModX is amazing tool, and makes to easy build pages.

hundred times better than the normal way to build static pages... if you have time do it, learn modx, is great.

and if you have not time, pay someone, there are a lot of people here...

bye!!!

Is that yourself included?

I’m by no means a developer or even competent in html, but I’ve worked on the commercial site of the web for 6 years, constantly working with teams of developers, making me very technically aware, but not capable.

I’m willing to spend time learning MODx, but I don’t want to have to code anything. I’ve build static sites using DW3 and other WYSIWYG software. Does MODx offer a WYSIWYG design tool?

Thanks again.

The resource content field comes with TinyMCE built in. If you use FireFox, you can use the "It’s All Text" FF add-on to edit just about anything else in your favorite external editor, including, I believe, Dreamweaver.

Blog or news type articles are done using the resource tree structure and the Ditto snippet for aggregation, and the Jot snippet is used for for commenting (Jot is also very useful for simple lists of things like FAQ question/answer pairs or anything else that needs to be easily managed but doesn’t really justify having a whole "resource" dedicated to each item). User validation is handled by the "Security" area.

I have my manager open to inspection, feel free to log in and poke around.

Ah right. That sounds good. So MODx doesn’t have a wysiwyg editor which I could build the site from the ground up with?

Sorry for all the questions, but to a non-technical user, this isn’t very clear looking around the site.

No, a MODx site is made up of different elements; of a template (the HTML skeleton which will not change and that contains the dynamic parts that are different for each page), and various snippets (pre-written bits of PHP code for dynamically creating menus, processing forms and other actions), chunks (bits of HTML content that can be used wherever they are wanted, such as your footer content), resources (the content, title, and other general page content and settings for each page) and Template Variables (custom fields for each resource, associated with specified templates).

Think of it like Legos. The template is a base plate. Snippets are like the motorized Lego parts; they do stuff. Resources are the red blocks, chunks are blue blocks, and Template Variables are yellow blocks. Mix and match as desired to build the final page.

Ok thanks for all the input. I’m sure these seem like stupid questions to yourselves, but this isn’t my specialism.

So lastly, could I combine these components into the site without coding? Could I start with a template and then add these different modules in graphically?

Thanks

No. You have to put the template’s HTML in (you can copy/paste from any HTML page to get started) and then put in the various MODx tags such as [*content*] to get the page’s content in place, or [[Wayfinder]] to generate a menu. It is not graphical.