What did you use before MODx?

I love MODx! But has anyone here used movable type? How does it match up against MODx?

One’s for blogging and one is a content management system + PHP application framework.

How does a kite compare to a pogo stick? Actually scratch that, a more apt analogy would be a surgical scalpel and set of woodshop tools. If you need surgery (a blog), use the scalpel. If you want to build an online house, use the shop tools.

Quote from: rthrash at May 06, 2008, 08:25 AM

One’s for blogging and one is a content management system + PHP application framework.

How does a kite compare to a pogo stick?

rofl.

wow nice thanks.

We were using Mambo/Joomla and are SO glad we found MODx.

Must have opened possibilities for you indeed !

Welcome on board

Hi Folks,

first of all: tahnks for bringing us MODX, or as i call it, Typo for sane people.
I also come a long way i used the following systems:

Nuke: Don’t get me started. I don’t even would call it a CMS. It’s a Portal System and not very good. HTML Markup, Plugin structure....don’t get me started.

Mambo/Joomla: Both are terrible. The GUI is a royal pain in the *** and making a Valid XHTML page requires Base Component Hacking. I inherited a project from a friend for a school. They wanted a page made with Joomla, cause the schools admin was on a joomla training 2 years ago. So i tried to do it with Joomla what my friend started. it was nearly impossible cause joomlas "structure" is so bad. my friend also told me, that they would never allow me to switch cms. well i showed them MODX compared to Joomla: 10 minutes later i was allowed to do it with ModX. Switching took 10 hours and i had some things up and running which did not work with Joomla at all. i am still working on this:

http://pictorius.codefighter.de/ -> MODX Version (German)
http://pictorius.codefighters.de/ -> JOOMLA Version (Many Hacks, not Completely Dynamic, a lot of Stuff does not work)

Typo3: Typo3 is a beast. You can really do everything with it. But the complexity makes it hard to develop sites fast. ALso the GUI is way to complicated for the ordinary content editor. With great power comes great responsibility


What I love about MODX:
- GUI (simple yet powerfull), Clients like it
- lightweight: superb base functionality which is easy to extend
- no base hacking required
- SEO, Search Engines love MODX Sites
- Chunk/Snippets/TVs, how much more flexibility can you get?
- API: you gotta love the API (documentation could be better though, but the community totally makes up for that)
- Community

Quite a long post, but i feel with modx i found my cms and i am very glad
Keep up the good work.

Greetings from Germany Dodg3r

Thanks for the feedback, we don’t mind long post quite the contrary, it helps understanding where we lack and where we have an edge
Welcome to the fun that MODx is building websites !

Hello!

I’m on the other side of the scale compared to some previous posters. I decided to use a CMS back end my personal game project website. I was using just wordpress for a blog but now that my project is coming along, felt I wanted a more full-featured site eventually (and I love learning new things!).

About a year ago a dozen CMSs but didn’t do anything with them, really liking Drupal. A month ago I finally got back to setting up the site and tried out Drupal and Joomla again but liked the ease of use of Joomla 1.5 and found the back-end UI very easy to use. I set up some articles and some pages to display them and a screenshot gallery plug-in and spent a lot of time trying out a bunch of free templates.

Eventually, I got to thinking what if I wanted to combine some screenshots from my gallery on a page with some article snippets... or what if I wanted to combine some views of different categories, or show snippets in a different matter? I started to see that Joomla was great for a quick out-of-the-box experience but it didn’t seem to want you to go beyond that so I looked around...

I tried out Drupal again and Typo3 and TikiWiki. I know Drupal is supposed to be great but something about the menu system and toxonomy/story/book theme just doesn’t click with me. TikiWiki amazed me but found it too much. Typo3 intrigued me the most and I thought I’d use it but it seemed more difficult and obtuse than needed (especially for what I needed).

I was reading on a Typo3 thread and someone mentioned MODx which I remember I tried out a while ago but nothing else. I played with it again and it began to really click. A year ago, I was turned off by having to edit text snippets instead of a GUI plug-in-play system like Joomla, but now I saw this as a plus since it allows for amazing flexibility.

Last weekend I finally moved my Joomla site over to MODx (not all of my content is back yet, my actual project has the priority!) but I’ve been having a lot of fun getting it working. I love working with a system that makes me think, "I can do what I want, I just need to learn it" versus Joomla which made me feel "I’m not sure if I can get what I want, maybe I can find some plugin/template close enough..."

Right now I am just using the default template and re-learning CSS along with MODx (stretching out the default template, changing the side bar etc) and will eventually re-theme it with my own styles. In the meantime, I just wanted to say thanks to the MODx crew and look forward to more learning, future versions and having a website I can be proud of!

Thanks!

i’ve done a lot of work with drupal (theming, module development, etc) due to work requirements, and i’m probably going to stick with it now that i’ve struck out on my own, but i used modx for my business site and plan on learning as much as possible to see if it’s suitable for what i need. i know i’m used to drupal, and it’s great for a lot of what i’m planning to do, but the resource overhead is insane and i don’t feel comfortable subjecting customers to it.

all in all modx seems a bit less up front than drupal as far as the learning curve goes, and i’d love it if somebody could point me out to any sort of articles highlighting the differences between the two and how they can be resolved. i’m really interested in dropping drupal if i can achieve the same results in modx without a ton more hassle.