SilverStripe to ModX

Hi guys,

I’ve been using SilverStripe for sometime, now, but I’m fed up with having to perform somersaults to do simple things in SS. Ergo, I’m looking for something, er, not exactly better, but more centric to the types of websites I’m usually asked to build. Now, I’ve taken a look at Drupal and while that does look powerful, I can see myself performing those somersaults again. So, I’m now looking at ModX.

To give an idea, here’s a recent site I built in SS. As you can see, I’m using an unordered list of items for a header, I use an unordered list of objects for the footer and I have various levels of navigation in the page that do not generally exist in one place... I want to find out how simple this is in ModX, and how simple it would be to add an admin page or area for the client to be able to update them.

To refine what I’m looking for; I need to be able to create an object type in the CMS, which the client can administer nicely in the backend and assign one or more of these per page. Each object should be able to include images, links to pages or offsite pages, text, WYSIWYG text and more. It needs to be simple to setup and simple to edit in the admin.

Can I do this with ModX?

I’ve seen in the docs that I can create snippets and add that to a template, and use a chunk to format how the output of the snippet will look, but how do I make that nicely editable for the client, and how can the client add and remove groups of these object from a page?

Another quick question I have (which I’ll search for in a moment) is how I can make the content field in the admin into a WYSIWYG, such as TinyMCE... Doesn’t ModX come with a flag I can set to turn this on? Or do I need to install something to get this?

Thanks loads. I know it’s a lot of questions, but I’m really hoping ModX can replace SS in my working day.

Lee

Okay, so, I’ve worked out a lot with ModX... Very nice btw. I’ve also found some nice tutorials. However, my biggest issues are:

1. I need to create a group of fields - say image1, image2, title, description, date - which describes a content block, then assign multiples of these to a given page. In SilverStripe, you do this by creating a DataObject and adding a DataTable to your page template for containing these items. Then, in the admin, you simply create a new instance of this DataObject, populate it, set it to "include in this page" and publish... Nice and simple.

Now, I’ve seen people suggest that a new template is created and TV’s set for this template, then add them to the page as children. I don’t like this option... It’s too messy. I’d prefer that I can do this with a snippet or somesuch, but if I do, how do I allow multples of these to be assigned to a page and how can the non-coding savvy client add, edit and delete them?

Also, presuming there is a way to do this, can I also assign them to a given template, not just a given page (in case a bunch of pages of a certain type need to show the same objects)?

Thanks again for any help you guys can provide... I’m really liking ModX so far. If I can crack this nut, I’ll be ditching SilverStripe for sure.

Lee