I’ve done my fair share of research into CMS, and eventually came to MODx by recommendation from a friend. It turns out that if you google Joomla and Drupal etc, you find lots of communities all comparing Joomla to Drupal. But none of them crossed over to MODx - it was like those people had never heard of it. It didn’t show on their radar at all.
Then my friend mentioned MODx, and upon googling it I suddenly unlocked a NEW community that was discussing all three. But the distinct difference between the communities was that those discussing only Joomla and Drupal were all bloggers and people looking for a quick fix to their CMS requirements. Much of the discussion was based on the use of addons and the ways and means to control the layout of the site from within the admin UI. But the community involving MODx, while invariably praising MODx, seemed to be full of real developers discussing coding/scripting techniques for achieving custom behaviour from a much lower level. Yes there was talk of addons and plugins, but almost nothing about layout control within the admin UI.
At first that concerned me, until I started building my own test site. Then I realised one important truth about CMS driven sites: Realistically, once you build a sizable site using either CMS and perhaps hand it over to those who will actually OPERATE the site, it quickly becomes obvious that the end users require no control over the layout of the site from within the admin UI. That sort of functionality seems entirely redundant except in extreme circumstances when someone might randomly decide to shift a block from the left column to the right, or something equally unimportant in the grand scheme. That kind of thing is decided at design time, and can be altered by the original developer if necessary. The chances an end user will want to do that kind of thing SHOULD be fairly small. I’m not saying it’s a useless feature, just one around which a CMS shouldn’t be entirely centred.
So it occurred to me that the MODx admin UI is all about content management! Not layout management. And as such, rather than effectively limiting the creative flexibility of the site within the admin UI, it seems to have been completely removed allowing the developer to just get on and do it in code – as would need to be the case if you aren’t just using a template anyway. So ultimately you end up with a system for the discerning developer rather than the hapless end user. By that I mean that the developer can build the system and make it do absolutely anything, with few restrictions, and then pass it to the end user who can manage the content of the site without the unnecessary clutter of lamentably inhibitive layout controls.
And so I concluded that the reason the MODx community is comparatively small, perhaps, is because it takes a more advanced, explorative developer to really grasp the benefits and put them into practise. The masses, the majority, who look for a quick and easy CMS end up considering the likes of Joomla and Drupal not because they’re better, but because they seem realistic and rather jolly. And for what they are I’m sure they’re great. They’re long established and presumably well developed, and do what they set out to do. But as several others above have intimated, once you crack MODx you’ll probably never consider going back! It’s that or you’ll give up early on because you might not be as advanced a developer as required to use MODx in the first place.
I suppose it’s analogous to the tiny minority of us who buy/build more expensive PCs, putting as much money as can be afforded into CPU and RAM because ultimately that’s what is going to define the long term quality of the user experience. But the masses will buy their rig off the shelf from PC World, Currys or perhaps Dell because it’s cheaper, easier, and most of the time will do the job fairly well, but inevitably end up cursing their machine down the line because it ‘slows down’ and is generally underpowered when combined with the evolving nature of software like the OS and AV. I don’t mean to sound like I’m saying Joomla will slow down and cause problems. More that it won’t necessarily bend quite so nicely to your will (unless you ARE advanced and you put in likely more effort than it would take to achieve the same in MODx) and that eventually you’ll discover limitations that you simply can’t overcome without some hardcoded modification to the system.
So basically I think MODx is really for the more advanced, discerning minority who know enough to develop properly, rather than the ‘less skilled’, ‘cookie cutter’ generation. That isn’t meant to insult, so I hope nobody takes offense, but in most walks of life there is a more advanced, perhaps more expensive option that anyone would use if they could – MODx is it. It can never be the biggest and most popular CMS because this movie is an 18 and the box office takings are ruled by successful family flicks!
Cheers for watching.
☆ A M B ☆
☆ A M B ☆