Local news portal

I’m in the early stages of tailoring a soup-to-nuts installation of ModX for local newspapers. These kinds of companies do a lot of good in society, but generally can’t afford updated websites, so I’m going to give them something awesome.

WORK IN PROGRESS

I’d like to use this thread to ask some questions about layout and design, licensing, and custom tailoring the backend. Sound good to you guys?

That is a nice design. Your plan is to provide turn-key sites for newspapers? Sounds like an interesting project.

Seems the template is all hard-coded job since all links referring to the same content!?

Your plan is to provide turn-key sites for newspapers?

Yup. The industry is hemorraging, so the plan is to build the Ferarri -- or maybe something like the VW GTI -- of local news sites and hand it out for free.

Seems the template is all hard-coded job since all links referring to the same content!?

Those are all dynamically pulled through Ditto, I just haven’t coded a template for the single pages.

So first question.. what are the boundaries of the ModX license? I know I can skin it up and repackage it open-source, but can I charge for consulting services? To what extent can I rebrand the backend manager to fit each install?

You can charge whatever you want and I hope you make a bundle. As well, creating a custom manager skin is entirely kosher, and that’s why we make it straightforward and easy to do. Good luck with your venture!

You’re also free to run off and call it whatever you want, but please don’t ask for support on these forums if you so choose to do so.

Wow, straight from the top!

I’ve got no intentions on "running off," and have chosen ModX in part because of the community. I’d like these papers to take to ModX as much as I have.

I would like to skin the backend through (perhaps just change the colors), and so I appreciate that you’ve built it to be able to accept such modifications.

Anyways, some 200+ validations errors later, I’ve got a cross-browser and valid working front page template. Baby steps, people!

Anyone have any ideas why the following occurs?

This works fine when I call this into a snippit:



This code calls the same file, but seems to strip out all the local variables:

Figured the above all out.

I’m making some progress on the article-level pages. What do you think?

That’s looking good so far. How did you resolve the previous problem?