Hi all,
First post. I am a newbie at MODx (really all CMS products) although I’ve managed several websites in the past. My experience is what I would call "old school", get a designer to build a template, and then build a site by copying the template over and over again. Most of my experience was with a site built using circa-2000 design practices (a mix of tables and CSS, VBScript navigation, a few small Javascript calls for things like email obfuscation and form validation). I was comfortable managing the site, but it was quite burdensome as the content was integral to the layout, so changes and updates were done using the copy-change-publish routine. Navigation changes also required me to directly modify VBScript includes, which I could do, but it also contributed to inefficiency.
I’d like to use a better mechanism for my new site(s). I am not a designer, so I really need a solution that I can buy a "template" for and then add/remove/move/change pages from some kind of admin "backend". I’ve looked into "CMS" solutions such as Drupal, Joomla!, SilverStripe, MODx, and Concrete. I’ve only actually used Drupal, Joomla, and MODx (and MODx only for a few minutes). I like the idea of being able to use standards based templates for MODx infrastructure, and MODx appears to generate cleaner code and is more friendly to search engines, developers, etc. Those reasons, and the initial simplicity of the MODx admin interface (compared to Joomla) draw me to MODx as my solution.
One thing I’ve run into is that it appears that Joomla actually does a more strict job of separating content from layout. In Joomla, I create "Articles" and declare categories for them and then the configuration for those categories (which pages pull text from which categories, how articles are displayed, how many are displayed, etc) determines how the site renders. Because MODx orients around "Pages", and those Pages are edited directly, I get the feeling that MODx connects content and layout more directly.
For example, if I wanted to move content from the home page to a news page, or replace an older news item with a new one and have the new one replace the old one on the home page. It appears that I would have to edit the home page and then edit the news page in order to do so in MODx. To contrast, in Joomla I would create the new "news" article, and as long as I have the site configured to do so, the new news article would appear on the home page and also at the top of the news page, above the older news article.
Am I off base on how MODx works? If so, how do I get MODx to handle content say, in a priority of new to old...??
Thank you for your help. I hope that MODx will work for me, as Joomla is quite frustrating...
Chris