Quote from: rx2 at Apr 26, 2011, 11:13 AM
Lemonstand is by far the most MODx like one I’ve come across though a bit more raw. It is by far the best thought out and has template abstraction that appeals to me. It is not free, but the cost of it is way cheaper than developing similar features or getting templates into other systems. Developer version is free.
I’m with my buddy RX - I haven’t made a live site yet with Lemonstand, but I am running the test version, and it looks very hot! Excellent features, and, most importantly for me, a great templating setup. I know we MODx-ers don’t like paying for stuff, but I would strongly suggest taking a look at that.
btw, I just did a small job on Magento, my first. I was hired to change the header (which I did with CSS and graphics and code changes), do some menu tweaking (also code changes and styling), and do some product display styling. I will pile on and say "yuck". It’s not too bad, it does have a whole lot of features. But templating it? No way to get at it in the admin - you download the theme code, which is spaghetti-like. Scratch your head while you search their docs and forum to figure out how to make a menu or whatever. Then upload with FTP. So last century. Sorry to curse here: it’s almost Joomla-like in its inflexibility.
Probably the worst job ever like this for me was getting a very frou frou artsy-fartsy Photoshop comp, and they wanted me to "theme" XCart with it. As many of you know, you absolutely want to look at a system first before planning your template if at all possible. Otherwise you triple the work. The design was just about diametrically opposed to XCart. XCart code was SO hideously mixing content and presentation, that to get it to work I ended up hard-coding inline styles everywhere, in scripts strewn all about their file system. A just pitiful implementation of Smarty. I hope for their sake that it’s better now.
Cheers
☆ A M B ☆
