Help needed developing a bolt on garage application

Hi,

Firstly well done to all the modx developers, this is really a great piece of kit

Up until about a week ago I was just about to crack on developing my own CMS using the symfony-project.com framework until I realised that actually most of my projects are 90% cms and only 10% bespoke application. So im now thinking I start with a kick ass cms and then bolt on the extra applications I need. It would have taken ages to develop my own cms and Im not convinced that symfony offers enough to make it worth it. (thoughts?)

So I’ve trawled through all the modx documentation and im still a bit confused as to the best use of (modules, snippets, tvs, documents, ditto etc) for a ’garage’ / ’car sales’ website.

I need...

Frontend
-------

A side box on some of the pages with details of featured cars.

A page with the listing of all the cars with search/filter options

A detailed page of a particular car.

Backend
------

Create, Update, delete cars and details and photos


I’m sure others are equally confused about the different methods. I’d be up for writing a wiki page on creating a whole bolt on application if I get my head around it!

Thanks in advance,

John

hi,

you could easily achieve what you are describing without writing one line of php code.
Most of the feature you looking for are already available.

1/ A side box on  some of the pages with details of featured cars.
=> Ditto + TVs

A page with the listing of all the cars with search/filter options
=> tvExplorer +  Ditto + TVs

A detailed page of a particular car.
=> TVs
=> photo gallery : Maxigallery

tvExplorer is yot net available, I will realease a public in the days to be.
but it allows to create advanced search form combining full text + Tvs + document tree parameters.

here is a sample form you can create with tvexplorer:
http://www.deco-in.com/recherche-avancee

I have recently tested the latest tvexplorer build in a very similar project as yours (car seller) but as I am not the author,  I cannot post the link here.

:-)

You can do all of this easily with standard MODx components. Just make each car a document and put its details in the content field (you may want to use MaxiGallery for its photos). Then use the Ditto snippet to create your listing pages, and AjaxSearch for searching them.

Your details sidebar can just be a single TV where you enter the info you want displayed there, but since a lot of your details will probably be standard (make, model, year, etc.), you may want to create a TV for each of those standard details and just output them all into your template. Doing so would make it easier to sort your listings dynamically based on this criteria using Ditto as well.

So it doesn’t seem to me as if you’d need to develop anything additional to make this work in MODx, since the essential snippets are already done for you.

EDIT: tvExplorer looks like it will be a great addition, so you might use that instead of AjaxSearch.

thanks heliotrope and zap, thats ace!

off to do some non-php developing.....