Is ModX CMS better than Joomla ?

MODx has the best adherence to MVC architecture that I’ve seen, and it is the gold standard in template flexibility -- making templates or even plugins in Joomla and Drupal are more akin to configuring Apache.

I know the Drupal kiddies are all coked out of their mind about knowing which modules to install, which is somewhat understandable because without certain modules some fundamental functionality would be woefully lacking. I’ve never had that experience with MODx. On some MODx sites, I don’t download *any* extras -- that would NEVER happen on a Drupal site, for example (possibly in Joomla too?).

Just thinking out loud. I second some of the others: what extras you need (if any) really depends on the requirements for your site.

Quote from: HotelVliegticket at Dec 17, 2010, 10:02 AM

Thanks for all the information !
First i will try ModX CMS on my site http://www.hotelvliegticket.nl
Can you also provide me with the best extensions for Mod CMS ?

Thanks

Be aware if you need ssl-encryption on certain webpages. If you really need ssl for booking or other things check out how you will manage this with MODx before starting your project. We still have lots of problems with ssl in our MODx-webpages. Up to now we have no correct working solution for ssl-encryption on single pages what is a big disadvantage of MODx at the moment. Maybe there will be a solution in the future. If you don´t need ssl, MODx will probably be fine for you...

@Letti what problem do you have with ssl?

http://4up2date.info/modx.html
https://india.site5.com/~fourup2d/modx.html

We were going to encrypt single pages by ssl using this plugin

http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,56650.msg332863.html

Unfortunately the plugin doesn´t work correctly. Using the first version the 404 error-page doesn´t work anymore. Using the improved version we got thousands of error-messages in our error-log leading to crash down the server because of RAM-Overload while many people went to our website.

Until now I saw no correct working solution for single-page-ssl. Beside this MODx is great but without this feature we cannot use MODx for professional projects...

Revo can force links to pages to use SSL without issue by using the scheme: http://rtfm.modx.com/display/revolution20/modX.makeUrl

You can do this with a link to the page:

Hi Ryan,

thanks a lot for your reply. The way you mentioned works for normal links on a website but I think if you have a menu made by the wayfinder this way probably doensn´t work?

We need a ssl-solution which works in combination with wayfinder. Do you have any idea how to solve this challenge?

Letti

You could do something like the following and it should work:
[*] set up a TV [[*forceSSL]] with checkbox that is a value of 1 and no default value
[*] for the pages you always want to be rendered via SSL check that checkbox
[*] in your Wayfinder tpl, use an output filter to test for that and modify the way the template outputs:


note: totally untested but something close to that should work

Thanks a lot!!! We will try it out right now...

Hi,
The last idea sounded so promising, that I wanted to try it. After doing 32 different tries, I found something that I think is working!

I used this as my rowTpl for Wayfinder:



Btw, this was a quick education in Wayfinder placeholder syntax for Revo. Note that I didn’t use the TV as suggested above - I’m sure you can adapt my call to do that. Also note that I have wf.docid rather than wf.link.

And boom, all my links have https appended to them! I did get SSL errors, but this is just my test system, and I don’t think I’m fully set up for SSL via port 443 and all that.

Awesome idea, Ryan!
Dave

PS: I should note that if someone only has a few secure pages needed, .htaccess can handle all of that, and no need for the fancy Wayfinder call. It would be a real shame to use Joomla only because of not being aware of that, or not having a very small pinch of mod_rewrite programming ability.

PPS: regarding the topic of this thread, I spent months working on a Joomla system. It was nearly the worst project I’ve been on, ever. Templating it alone was truly wretched, compared to MODx (of course, MODx can pretty much beat almost any system in templating). On that system, I was editing raw PHP files for most template work. Also, imagine a system that is so confusing that even though you use it every day for long periods of time, you still can’t find things in the admin, even if you used them yesterday. We had 3 people working on the system, and they would send me looking for stuff, because they could find even less than I could in there. I’ve said before, though, that if you have a pet commercially supported plugin that you like, and you can except a Joomla template as-is, you could possibly like Joomla. Beyond that, I can’t imagine why it’s so popular. Maybe the newer version sucks less.

@Ryan
Meanwhile we tried to implement your way managing ssl-sites. However it seems to be not that easy because we use this accordion-menu:
http://www.kunane.com/modx/wayfinder-nested-accordion.html

Our wayfinder-call is:
[[Wayfinder? &startId=`0` &outerTpl=`acc-outer` &hereClass=`expand` &selfClass=`active` &categoryFoldersTpl=`acc-folder` &innerTpl=`acc-inner` &level=`3`]]

The corresponding chunks are:

acc-folder:


acc.inner:


I am therefore not sure if we can easily integrate your suggested call into rowTpl or how we have to do this.


@samba
You are completely right. htaccess was one of our first attempts to implement single ssl-sites. But unfortunately we haven´t been successful. We inserted these lines (webpage1-3 are sites to be ssl-encrypted) directly after "RewriteEngine On RewriteBase /" resulting in not completely ssl-encrypted sites. The browsers said that some files (maybe pictures or css-files or whatever) were not encrypted and therefore the browsers gave a warning.