Is MODx for me?

Hi all,

I am researching open source CMS systems for a newspaper site with nearly 1 million pageviews a month. We are currently running on an in house CMS, but it is pretty lacking. We may be looking at redesigning in the next 6 months and also considering a new CMS. I would like to know if Modx is a suitable fit for a newspaper site with numerous categories, feeds, blogs, galleries, content types, etc. And can support a large site with a lot of traffic.
Thanks!

is right for you

That’s good to hear.

How are Modx’s search capabilities?

Would it work well with custom import scripts? We currently export our stories as separate xml docs. We the have a cron that imports those stories into our CMS database. Obviously, this would take some custom fields for articles and categories.

I am partly considering Joomla because has a focus on publishing, but I have doubts about it handling the traffic.

Here is a list of requirements I saw another post about their newspaper CMS. I think it paints a good picture of what I am looking for as well.

CORE FUNCTIONALITY:

• Articles - the newspaper is released everyday at midnight
• Photos, video, multimedia galleries
• Sections - like any newspaper: domestic, international, arts, opinion etc.
• Archive - years of newspaper articles and a vital and central search
• Special reports - provisional and topical sections
• Reuse of content in different sections and on different sites
• User registration - system has to handle paying subscribers as well as freebies
• "My newspaper" - every reader should his own place on the net with all of his comments, saved articles, newsletters, feeds, and subscription info
• Community - rating system for articles, comments and users (reputation) - high rated content should rise to the top and in the comments it should be possible to differentiate between non registered, registered, verified and subscriber. Maybe even a "3 out of 5 found this comment interesting". Etc.
• RSS feeds for everything (news, sections, writers, comments etc.)
• Email and text message alerts, "email this", "receive alert on your cell when"
• Easy to read and search friendly permalinks
• Staff directory
• Flexible walling: we would like to have option to sell one article, micropayment: a daypass, access to the archieves for a week, a topical newsletter etc.
• E-commerce: buy the book, the movie, subscribe to the newspaper etc.


EXTRAS

• Polls
• Questionnaires
• Calendar (for events)
• Ad, banner and intersticials management
• Classifieds
• Reader blogs


CMS

• Role based CMS - super simple backend interface: editors should be able to create provisional sections on the fly, writers add stores ads easy like sending a Gmail
• Visual shuffling of content on pages (mayby some AJAXY interface - like netvibes.com). As we are a small organisation, we need the editorial (non-web) staff to take part in updating
• Image and document upload - maybe even some advanced image handling


TECHNICAL

• XML import - from our publishing system (Anygraaf - Doris)
• Open source, large community
• Upgradable
• PHP and MySQL
• Perfomance: Fast and database efficient

MODx is capable of doing all that, at least i can see Revolution handle it quite well... but it’s also a young project, and if you can’t build some of the facilities yourself, you’ll eventually hit a wall.

Drupal on the other hand has already a lot of component dedicated for this kind of website. It will not easier, but at lest they’re ready to use.

It really all depends on your php ability & budget.

Are those features already implemented one way or another in your already existing website?

Most of them are, but it takes a good couple hours of hacking and modding in order duplicate or add something new.

I’ve considered Drupal, but I am currently the only Web Developer on staff - may get one more if I’m lucky - and from what I understand Drupal takes quite a bit of knowledge and grunt work.

I am a moderate PHP Dev, not great. I am more like Front-End Dev who can write small applications. I’ve written a lot of CRUD, a couple login scripts, and some other small misc apps.

How difficult would it be to find a Modx Dev who’s code I can trust and can communicate well? I know finding someone local is out of the question (very few developers in the area).

That’s an interesting project, i’m pretty sure that someone on the forum can be interested.
You should also try linkedIn.

As a side note, if you choose MODx, will you be able to share some of your code with the community?

Thanks for the tip. I don’t see any reason why we couldn’t contribute to the community.

You can take a look at the existing components that can be a good base:

getResource to list articles and/or create RSS feed
Gallery for photo management
formIt for form processing
Archivist for archives
Quip for managing Comments

That’s a good start to familiarize yourself with MODx even though some of them would require some changes to fit your requirements.

I know this is off topic, but I just installed Modx Revolution on a demo server. Playing around in the UI now. I notice that there is not a WYSIWYG editor for the content area. Is there a way to add that? I don’t want anything crazy, but would like one that ads the basic html items - bold, italic, list, tables, etc. *But does it in standardized markup!

I’ve only spent a about 20 minutes snooping around it, and I can tell I like the way it is structured. I am however, a bit confused on how you would go about extending it. Do you build right into the core, manager, assets, connectors or do you create your own folder and connect it all together somehow?

Are there any recommendable training resources out there? How in depth is the documentation?