How to use Modx for an absolute beginner?

Hi

I would like to thank the Modx team for providing such a nice piece of software. I had used CMS made simple and Wordpress before, but was totally lost on Modx, ultra minimalist setup.

Please pardon me for asking the same old stupid question again. Probably this had been asked many times. I Googled and searching the forum but could not find useful information.

After reading the recommendation on the download page, I downloaded Revolution and successfully installed it on my laptop under XAMPP. First webpage is really clean, a blank page. No headers, no navigation, nothing. I knew that it was working because I could edit the content on the blank page by typing something to the resource content of the Resources-web-Home(1).
Is there any tutorial that would take me to design a page for Revolution. I read a few blogs, and many thanks to maryspad.com I learned how to install it and that was about it. There isn’t much tutorial about using it. The best source of information is probably the official documentation. I am a hand-on type of person, I would like to play with it to get a feel of things, get to know about the work-flow and refer to the documentation when I am stuck. Right now,I am stuck right at the beginning, I don’t even know where to start playing beside typing the few lines of miserable text.

After being stuck on a blank page, I Googled Modx again and found more tutorials and information regarding Evolution. So should I be starting from Evolution, to get up to speed with Modx? The next question is, after learning Evolution would it be a lot easier to upgrade my knowledge to Revolution? I am downloading Evolution while I am typing this.....

Any step by step guides would be great stepping stone for me.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. Hope somebody can give me some tips.

Regards
kc

The same basic principals as Evo apply, just that they’re in slightly difference places in the Revo UI, so you could use the old tutorials as a guide - especially with regards to template construction but take a look at how the Revo chunk, snippet and tv notation has changed from Evo. It’s probably worth building your site in Evo with the wealth of resources available out there and then making the crossover later on. Don’t know if this is of much help: http://codingpad.maryspad.com/2009/12/21/exploring-modx-revolution/

The site in my sig may help, although it doesn’t have the tutorial you’re looking for. I don’t think it exists for Revolution yet. As hotdiggity suggests, you could use an Evo tutorial and translate the tags (see the Revolution Tags page at my site). Some of the things are in different places in Revolution, but creating and editing documents works pretty much the same and you should be able to find the other things you need easily once you get used to it.

If the site is at all complex, I don’t recommend developing it in Evolution, though, because converting it to Revolution would not be a trivial process at this point and a few of the things you would learn for Evolution will actually hurt you when you try to understand Revolution (especially permissions).

kc

glad you’ve found the tutorials on my blog helpful for Evolution. I am working on a very similar beginner series for Revolution, and I’m about to tackle working with templates in Revolution, to be posted this week. In the meantime you can check the first three posts in the series here: http://codingpad.maryspad.com/

Quote from: einsteinsboi at Sep 07, 2010, 01:26 AM

kc

glad you’ve found the tutorials on my blog helpful for Evolution. I am working on a very similar beginner series for Revolution, and I’m about to tackle working with templates in Revolution, to be posted this week. In the meantime you can check the first three posts in the series here: http://codingpad.maryspad.com/

That’s great news.

I look forward to seeing them.

Hi all,

Thank you very much for your support and suggestions.

I had some early success building (more like copying) a template following the instruction here.
http://jgulledge.wordpress.com/2010/06/26/learning-modx-tutorial-1-creating-a-template/
I don’t know who the author was, but I thank him very much for the wonderful tutorial.

Having a hand-on session on building a template helps lubricate my rusty brain. I am happy
that I got some basic idea of how things were done in Modx. I could see that there isn’t really
a need for a elaborate template when Modx first installs.

Thanks again. Now I can get on to learning about Modx. I will also be regularly checking
Bob’s and Mary’s site for tips while learning Modx.

Cheers.
kc

You can also try this for step-by-step explanations of what’s going on as you build various elements. http://sottwell.com/modx-from-the-inside.html

Hi Susan,

Thank you for pointing your site to me. I sure will head over there to look for answers.

Rgds,
kc