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    • 13207
    • 59 Posts
    The features page was very basic so I’m posting questions here...

    I have several business websites with static content that I maintain. Have been looking for an open source CMS in what seems like forever.
    Had about decided on Drupal for its’ many features that would benefit my business web sites, but also attracted to Ruby on Rails for its’ large potential, yet have been frustrated by the lack of robust CMS solutions with Rails currently. I’m not a strong PHP programmer, so wanting a CMS that has lots of available plugins for business functions.

    So with ModX, how would someone with existing web sites tie in their existing web page content into ModX? Does my content need to be put into a database in a certain format to prepare for working with ModX? Or would it be a drag and drop type thing via browser pages?

    I’m wanting to make web site pages more dynamic, search engine friendly of course, where members can login to see protected content, and where there are sections for classified ads, forums, and secure shopping cart capability. Is all this built into ModX or as separate modules? Just wanting to get a grasp of it all and how ModX would fit with my business websites.

    thanks,
    Cal
      • 18397
      • 3,250 Posts
      These are built in to MODx:

      Converting an existing site to MODx is very simple! All you need to do is design a template (just copy and paste your existing html code, replacing a few bits with cms tags) and then create documents for all of your content (there IS an import function which can help with this).

      Webusers will allow you to have members login and see protected content.

      These are/will be modules:

      Simple Machines Forums (the forum system here) is being integrated as we type.

      A shopping cart system could easily be integrated.

        • 13207
        • 59 Posts
        Holy quacamole (as Robin would say), that sounds simple! What about ecommerce functions? I didn’t see any reference to carts of the such in doing a search. I assume that it’s a matter of putting in the necessary script wanted.
        Thanks.

        One comment on your movies, can they be Flash or anything other than Quicktime? I’d rather not download it as it’s intrusive like Real Media player when installed and tends to lock up my browser (no, it’s not IE, is multi-tabbed Maxthon)...
          • 18397
          • 3,250 Posts
          Ummmmm, I guess this isn’t typed out anywhere but the biggest feature of MODx is that you are not restricted!

          You can place whatever content you want on the site and MODx won’t care!!!!

          If you are talking about using the RTE (FCKeditor) to insert it that then yes thats all it supports but you could copy and paste the code manually.
            • 22303 MODX Staff
            • 10,725 Posts
            Quote from: itsawebthing at Nov 16, 2005, 09:11 AM

            so wanting a CMS that has lots of available plugins for business functions.

            We’re early in our development, so there are not a lot of pre-fab plugins written for us yet, but we get new contributions everyday. Our community is growing quickly and the things I’ve see done with MODx so far are quite simply amazing, especially after spending a few years playing around with the *Nukes, Mambo, and countless commercial J2EE portal site builders. Look for a large number of various, high-quality components, including integration plugins for major other systems, to start popping up around here.

            Quote from: itsawebthing at Nov 16, 2005, 09:11 AM

            So with ModX, how would someone with existing web sites tie in their existing web page content into ModX? Does my content need to be put into a database in a certain format to prepare for working with ModX? Or would it be a drag and drop type thing via browser pages?

            I’m wanting to make web site pages more dynamic, search engine friendly of course, where members can login to see protected content, and where there are sections for classified ads, forums, and secure shopping cart capability. Is all this built into ModX or as separate modules? Just wanting to get a grasp of it all and how ModX would fit with my business websites.

            This totally depends on your existing content, but I’ve converted 20 page static websites in a matter of minutes with MODx. There is even an import static site feature that will import your existing site content into MODx so you can create your template, do any prep-work or clean-up in your favorite HTML editor, upload it to the import directory, and your conversion to MODx is done, though you’ll probably want to replace a bunch of that static content with dynamic widgets and other cool new features. wink
              • 12631
              • 5 Posts
              I searched and browsed all over for documentation of the "import site" technique you describe but couldn’t find anything. Can you point me to documentation or give me a few hints if its currently undocumented?

              Thanks
                • 25663 MODX Staff
                • 12,272 Posts
                Importing sites is one of the greater mysteries to me. Jason makes extensive use of it, so I hope this inquiry will spurn him to write up a quick howto/best practices article. Thanks for asking! smiley
                  Ryan Thrash, MODX Co-Founder
                  Follow me on Twitter at @rthrash or catch my occasional unofficial thoughts at thrash.me
                  • 32241
                  • 1,495 Posts
                  As far as shopping cart system involve, we currently haven’t got any of this system being integrated to MODx yet, but there are 2 people that had done a shopping cart solution from scratch, using MODx capability with a different kind of approach. One of them is actually running on a production site, but I’m not to for sure how’s the system so far. The other system has attracted quite a lot of audience so far, and I believe one of the user in this community willing to take on this sytem and bring it into a production stage system where we can use on production site.

                  I would personally recommend you to contract one of MODx developer in here to do the job for you. But if you’re only looking for a static page management tool, than you can do it on your own. It’s a nobrainer task, and it won’t take too much learning curve on your part.

                  I’m looking forward to see you around in this forum.

                  Sincerely,
                    Wendy Novianto
                    [font=Verdana]PT DJAMOER Technology Media
                    [font=Verdana]Xituz Media
                    • 28122
                    • 51 Posts
                    Quote from: iconoclast at Jan 30, 2006, 10:46 PM

                    I searched and browsed all over for documentation of the "import site" technique you describe but couldn’t find anything. Can you point me to documentation or give me a few hints if its currently undocumented?

                    Thanks
                    I’ve only toyed with this functionality briefly, iconoclast, and don’t remember much, if any documentation for it. But it’s not hard to play with. In the manager, go to Administration > Import Site. The instructions are brief, but seem to be all that is necessary.
                      • 22303 MODX Staff
                      • 10,725 Posts
                      Briefly, until I have time to write something more, the import function will read the entire document structure in the /assets/import/ directory, including subfolders, and will recreate that tree (using your default settings for new documents, which you can set in Site Administration) in MODx, importing any .htm, .html, or .xml documents. You can control the parent document in MODx to import the structure into it as well. If it finds a title tag in the document, it uses that as the page title, otherwise, the filename is used. Otherwise, it imports whatever is between the body tags only, into the content for each document it creates.

                      So I typically take a static site, strip out the general layout of the pages into a template (or copy Dreamweaver templates) marking appropriate areas for editable content with the MODx [*content*] tags, and then clean up all the pages in my favorite editor, leaving only what I want to appear in the content of the document between the body tags. Not completely automatic, but very handy for large sites being converted to MODx. If you do it in stages though, you can easily just import the site into blank templates at first while you create a fancy new XHTML/CSS-compliant one (come on, you know you want to laugh )

                      The script is very small and easily customizable (located at /manager/actions/static/import_site.static.action.php). In fact, Ryan and I used a custom version of it I wrote for a project a few months ago, to import 100’s of Word documents we turned into HTML using an army of tools and people (ok, maybe I exaggerate now and and again, but it is amazing the hoops you have to go through to turn a simple, cleanly formatted Word document into simple, cleanly formatted HTML tongue ) into a custom data base.

                      Pretty handy little script actually. Let me know if you have specific questions until I create a formal document, or someone volunteers to do it for me... (sigh)