How do I create a simple blog-like news page?

Hi, this is my first post, so apologies if it’s not in quite the right place.

I’m trying to set up a (hopefully) simple blog-like news page, but I’m somewhat confused as I’ve found at least three different pages describing different ways of doing so, but from further reading it seems that at least some of them may be a little out-of-date (regarding function names, parameters, etc).

Could anybody give me some (simple) pointers in the right direction for the following?

We are developing a site (using MODx 0.9.6.1p2, I am sure we will upgrade to the new version in time, but for now getting the site finished is the priority!) with multiple users (who each have responsibility for editing their own subset of pages).

We’d like for a subset of users (possibly only one person - we can probably work on trust, if this would be fiddly to enforce, permissions-wise) to be able to write "news" articles, which we would like to list (the ’n’ newest articles) in summary form embedded in the home page (which also contains other content), with links to the full articles, and ’older/newer’ links, etc. We won’t need the capability for other users to be able to add comments.

I gather that I probably need to use some or all of Ditto, Jot and NewsPublisher, but with numerous different descriptions of how to possibly do this, I’m getting quite confused. I have a reasonable amount of PHP experience, but am obviously still finding my feet with MODx.

If anybody can offer any advice, I’d be very grateful, thanks!

For starters, if you haven’t done so already, do a test install of MODx with the demo content installed. What you are trying to do sounds very much like the simple blog that is illustrated in the demo content. If you study how that is setup (it uses Ditto, Jot and Newspublisher) then you should help you get started on your own implementation.

Thanks for your advice. I do indeed have a further MODx installation on a test server for this kind of experimenting, but unfortunately didn’t install the demo content. Do you know if there is an easy way to install the demo content after the MODx installation (I’d rather not have to blow it away and reinstall it again)?

http://blog.medianotions.de/en/articles/2008/trymodx.com-modx-demo

Ditto is the document listing/showing snippet. By templates and settings you
can sort, paginate and choose how much content from a doc you want to show.
This by placing +placeholders+ in the templates. Articles can be sorted in
categories by calling tags (tv, pagetitle, id etc)

http://www.vimeo.com/929777?pg=embed&sec=929777

Then there is reflect snippet that archive your articles by month, year, pub_date, crededon date...

http://ditto.modxcms.com/
http://ditto.modxcms.com/files/snippet-reflect-php.html
http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/Creating_a_Blog_like_in_the_Default_Content
http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/Basic_Blog
http://modxcms.com/blog-tutorial.html

For posting blogs you can use NewsPublisher or set up NewsEditor/NewsManager
http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,31422.msg190560.html#msg190560

Then its searching this forum and ask qurestions!

Quote from: david55 at Dec 17, 2008, 10:12 AM

Thanks for your advice. I do indeed have a further MODx installation on a test server for this kind of experimenting, but unfortunately didn’t install the demo content. Do you know if there is an easy way to install the demo content after the MODx installation (I’d rather not have to blow it away and reinstall it again)?

Best way would be to re-run the MODx installer and select the Upgrade option - you’ll then be given the option to install the demo content (note that this will overwrite any existing data in the install so make sure you backup anything that you want to save first)