What is the blog strategy (if any) for Revolution

Hi dev team.

We’ve done a few sites on modx evo now - in all cases we simply slap on wordpress for the blog, which means we are doing a modx template and a wordpress theme (two separate sites) - which is not so bad as basically we use the same css and div structure works if you pay attention to what you are doing.

However, with revo to me it seems like once that is launched and stabilized, this cms really could use a robust blogging system. Any plans to add this need to the core of the project?

Thanks in advance for any clarification as we are having discussions internally about doing a wordpress/modx integration project (which is always a hacky road to go down).

Thanks in advance for any consideration/response.

-Stephen

The team will respond more precisely, but in my opinion, blogging features does not belong to the core.

However, i’m totally agree with you to the fact that Revolution could be a soon to be good alternative to Wordpress for blogging with the help of 3rd party components.

I read on the forum that the team project to propose several release of MODx Revolution with different demo content and component. I think that one of them will probably be blog oriented and will give a good base to start blogging with MODx.

The problem will alaways be the same: 3rd party developpers.

MODx Revolution can be the next big thing if 3rd party devs start digging into it and propose nice and solid components for the asked task.

The fact that we are able to search for components within MODx backend is a big step ahead.

I can safely say that blogging will never be part of the MODx core (nor will anything else that aggregates and formats content in the front end).

I think it’s likely, though, that third-party components will be developed for blogging and that they will be easliy installable as packages in the Manager.

Im not sure what you mean by "robust blogging system". To me "blog" is simply a semantic reference to a type of data/content management and retrieval (or display) methods rather than a specific specific system in and of itself.

I think all of the framework functionality you have in something like wordpress, moveable type et. al has always been in ModX, at least it has in my case, so creating specific references in the core isnt the way to go simply because its, well, already there.

Thanks for the response Bob.

Need a better definition of what a "robust" blog really means. Displaying some content (text, images, video ...) + Commenting + Tags would seem to be the primary requirements for the individual pieces plus a way to organize/categorize and page through results overall.

For the categorization/overview in Revo there’s both Ditto and GetResources/GetPaged.

For the articles themselves, there’s Resources and TVs for things like tagging/images/etc.

For commenting there’s Quip or Discuss Add-ons, or if you’re really wanting the best of breed power-blogging commenting an integration with Disqus or Echo would be how I’d go. They provide robust authentication, moderation and antispam that would take a ton of work to do natively.

I’m sure I’m missing a lot, but what else would make a killer blog?

Quote from: rthrash at Jan 23, 2010, 04:16 AM

I’m sure I’m missing a lot, but what else would make a killer blog?

Easiness

I’m pretty sure that Revolution can be a wordpress killer. It just need more easiness...

One thing I like about WP is that it is easy to develop a theme that a user can install with one click. I think that the ModX equivalent to a WP theme would be a package. However, from the brief time I spent looking at the docs on how to create a package it seems much more complicated than creating a WP theme. For a WP theme, all I need to do is copy the default theme file structure, make a couple of modifications to the html / css and I’m up and running. I can change the entire look and feel of the website with one click.

Maybe creating a package isn’t as hard as it seems. I’m definitely planning on looking into it more. If I knew how to create a theme-package that users could install with one click, I probably wouldn’t bother with WP at all. Although, I’m not sure how that would work as far as changing from one theme to another in Modx. If a package provided templates would the user still have to manually go through each document and change-out templates for the new theme? I guess there would have to be naming conventions similar to the WP file structure such as ’page’ ’post’ ’author’ etc. that would need to be adhered to by all blogging packages.

Only other advantage of WP (for blogging - no comparison as a CMS) is, as mentioned previously, ’easiness’. The backend is much simpler and the drag and drop sidebar widgets are really nice. Now, the downside to WP’s simplicity is that it’s nowhere near as powerful as ModX. Perhaps an ideal scenario for ModX blogging would be a component / package (not sure which) that modifies the Modx backend to hide much of the functionality that would be unneeded for a simple blog application. Also, something like the drag-and-drop sidebar would be really cool.

Only other thing - Modx Revo TinyMCE is still really buggy, but I guess that’s just not a priority right now. I hate WYSWYG’s, but clients can’t seem to live without them.

I have made several templates for Revo and it’s almost as easy as with Wordpress.

Since MODx don’t have mandatory template markup "à la Wordpress", it will be close to impossible to provide a one click theme switcher as easy as the one of Wordpress.

It’s possible to give sample Chunks of columns,menus,etc so that the user can use them if needed. Not to mention the fact that the user can choose to use Ditto or getResources.

Changing template for several Document can be handled by DocManager or provided as a setup option with the packaged theme relatively easily.

Instead of hiding things in the manager, i would rather like a Front end component to handle blog scenario.

Quote from: lossendae at Jan 23, 2010, 05:21 PM

I have made several templates for Revo and it’s almost as easy as with Wordpress.

Templates of packages? Templates are simple - even easier than WP. It’s creating packages that I find challenging.

-matt