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    • 5210
    • 43 Posts
    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
      • 7231
      • 4,205 Posts
      You are missing some key concepts. Mainly that modx does not dictate how to do things, everyone finds ways of making modx fit into their methods of working.

      In modx ’pages’ are data elements (with no layout). the layout is controlled by templates and template chunks. With the use of snippets and the modx API we can use the data in any way we need. In the news page example, with ditto (or some other data aggregation snippet) the new news item will automatically be added to its place on the home page and all the archives will be automatically updated.

      Joomla’s big thing is plug-n-play giving you the user little flexibility. In modx you decide how you want to work.
        [font=Verdana]Shane Sponagle | [wiki] Snippet Call Anatomy | MODx Developer Blog | [nettuts] Working With a Content Management Framework: MODx

        Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is.
        Do you, Mr. Jones? - [bob dylan]
        • 19083
        • 15 Posts
        "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."

        I was a Joomla user before moving over to MODX. I think you’ll like what you see in MODX. To comment on the specific homepage scenario, you could edit both pages (homepage and newspage) or you could probably use a MODX snippet called Ditto. Ditto will look at a folder of MODX pages and make lists of those pages in date order (if that’s what you want).

        For example, on the homepage of one of my sites, I use Ditto to pull the page title and description of review pages. Whenever I add a new review, the homepage is automatically updated. If I have the review set to unpublish on a certain day, the homepage would change to reflect that. Same concept as Joomla, but you will decide exactly where Ditto will appear and what features it will offer.

        For me, MODX is the perfect combination of old style Website design (templates/pages) and CMS features (user control/automatic publishing of information). The jump for me was the "framework" aspect of MODX. Joomla already has the framework there. In MODX, you’re given the tools to make the framework what you want it to be.
        • For your news example, you’d most likely have a bunch of news articles in a folder called "news" or something similar. On your home page where you wanted the latest news article to appear, you could use a snippet like Ditto to show the most recent article(s) automatically. Ditto is really powerful and can do all sorts of crazy thing, even in this case returning a random news article from all those, giving you a full news archive elsewhere by date (with it’s companion snippet reflect), and so on. For more info on Ditto, see http://ditto.modxcms.com/

          As an example of the archive, see the demo content that is installed by default and mentally shift the blog into a news archive. Ditto just repeats content from one place into another. Can be used for more than just news, blogs, etc. in other words.
            Ryan Thrash, MODX Co-Founder
            Follow me on Twitter at @rthrash or catch my occasional unofficial thoughts at thrash.me
            • 10449
            • 956 Posts
            The fun continues once you discover template variables, @DOCUMENT bindings and other such stuff smiley