I’ve been working with MODx for less than a year and I’ve fallen deeply in love with it—particularly, Evolution. I’m interested in sort of expanding my open source CMS knowledge so I’m not the guy that only knows one CMS (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and I’d love to hear what the MODx community has to say about this matter. It seems to me from what I find online is that most other MODx-ers are using Drupal and/or WordPress—if they use more than just our beloved MODx that is.
I had heard good things about concrete5—then I had to log in and use it on a site and found it rather non-intuitive. I’ve also heard good stuff about ExpressionEngine but I think I remember that full custom design (like most CMSs) isn’t super easy to learn with EE. I have it in my head that Drupal is a powerful beast far too large for someone that’s not a serious Web developer and the learning curve has been called "massive" time and time again. WordPress interests me primarily because of its popularity and all the praise people are giving the version 3 as far as being more of a bonafide CMS. What about security issues though? And what’s the learning curve on creating fully custom themes? Is everything still a "post"? CMS Made Simple looked cool when I was in my original search for "my" CMS, but then I downloaded a theme package of files and there was a GIANT XML file. Whaaat? The other one that comes to mind is SilverStripe—people seem to dig it, still know nothing about it.
I hope this is an interesting topic to others and I’d love to hear what everyone has to say. Thanks in advance for your views!
¡Viva la MODx!
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Rico
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Drupal - I use Drupal and MODx almost 50/50 for most of my projects. I’ve been using Drupal for a long time, longer than I’ve been using MODx, and these two are my main CMSs of choice.
WordPress for blogs. Although I need to explore the expanded capabilities of WP3 more, I still pretty much use it only for blogs, or only if a client insists
Silverstripe - although I have to admit I haven’t done much with it, it’s growing on me.
@goldsky: Thanks for your answer. I just drooled a bit over the fact that SS has draft version of the site and a published version. Versioning/publishing workflow along with basic image editing are the two biggest things on my MODx feature wish list—I do believe that the draft thing is on the Revo roadmap . School me if I’m not aware of an awesome snippet or plugin for Evo. Safe to assume that MODx is still your first choice? I’d love to know why if you have a moment. Is the templating/design integration a big factor? Along with easy extensibility? Thanks again.
@einsteinsboi: Yay one of the MODx rockstars replied! The Coding Pad is fantastic. You were the first person that came to mind when I mentioned Drupal in my original post. Could you provide your opinion on the learning curve of Drupal for someone that is a designer before coder and knows primarily the basics of PHP? Is Drupal the choice for you mainly with projects that call for a great deal of functionality that’s already been built in plugins (or modules or whatever they’re called in Drupal)?
While I have not tried any of the new versions I have experimented with about ten or so different systems. I like MODx and Wordpress.
I think knowing Wordpress is a good skill. Its popular and it works pretty well really. Two good reasons plus clients often ask for Wordpress.
I totally hear you on the benefits of knowing more than one system. Sometime doing so reinforces your skill set. The other advantage is that you can talk the talk when it comes to going over the options with clients.
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Quote from: brianlarson at Jan 06, 2011, 08:35 PM
@goldsky: Thanks for your answer. I just drooled a bit over the fact that SS has draft version of the site and a published version. Versioning/publishing workflow along with basic image editing are the two biggest things on my MODx feature wish list—I do believe that the draft thing is on the Revo roadmap . School me if I’m not aware of an awesome snippet or plugin for Evo. Safe to assume that MODx is still your first choice? I’d love to know why if you have a moment. Is the templating/design integration a big factor? Along with easy extensibility? Thanks again.
Mark is building a
VersionX, the versioning 3PC for Revo.
But SS is having it out-of-the-box.
The
templating also easy, although not as easy as MODx (and that’s why I choose MODx
)
<?php // highlighting
<html>
<head>
<% base_tag %>
<title>$Title</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>$Title</h1>
<p>
<% control Menu(1) %>
<a href="$Link" title="$Description.JS">$Title</a>
<% end_control %>
</p>
<div class="typography">
$Content
</div>
</body>
</html>
And I like its right-menu-bar pop-up.
Have I mentioned that it has a *todo* tab per document?
Rico
Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
Thomas A. Edison
MODx is great, but knowing how to use it well makes it perfect!
www.virtudraft.com
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Maintainter/contributor of
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Super helpful. Thanks once again. I’m starting to maybe realize that TVs in MODx are a huge factor in its awesomeness (along with design integration, along with extensibility). It looks like many other CMSs are less of an IDE (for lack of a better term... or maybe that’s an accurate one for MODx).
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Hell yeah!!!
While you can see the template is almost the same as MODx, while MODx has TV which can be used as [[+tag]] out-of-the-box on top of template (plus chunks and snippets), SS needs you to build your own ’template’ in OOP way. Extends from main class.
*Sigh*.
Rico
Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
Thomas A. Edison
MODx is great, but knowing how to use it well makes it perfect!
www.virtudraft.com
Security, security, security! |
Indonesian MODx Forum |
MODx Revo's cheatsheets |
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Author of
Easy 2 Gallery 1.4.x,
PHPTidy,
spieFeed,
FileDownload R,
Upload To Users CMP,
Inherit Template TV,
LexRating,
ExerPlan,
Lingua,
virtuNewsletter,
Grid Class Key,
SmartTag,
prevNext
Maintainter/contributor of
Babel
Because it's hard to follow all topics on the forum, PING ME ON TWITTER
@_goldsky if you need my help.
Hence why designers and developers alike love them some MODx. I love the "no theme" factor and for non-hardcore-dev types (many of which may not even know what OOP stands for) don’t have to extend themselves any classes. They just gotta learn how templates, tvs, chunks and snippets all work together. Is there even a CMS out there that can hold a candle to MODx’s "no-theme templating" (again, for lack of a better term)?
Out of curiosity (and I’m not switching topics), have you shifted to Revo for all new projects? I’m just not there yet, but I am dabbling with Revo on small projects as I know Evo will go bye bye some day... I think. Probably a long ways off though.
