If you were asked to write a sales brochure for Ditto what would you say...

I am trying to sort out Ditto...

I am still learning MODx and working on a "test" small community site for the "experience." Like some of the cool Snippets I see with MODx I have yet to find a good description of what it does. There is a ton of info about calls, specific instances and problems etc. After reading these various posts it seems to me that Ditto has a wide range of features and ways it can be incorporated into various specific projects.

Lets say you were asked to write a brief, easy to understand paragraph (or two) that would explain what Ditto is, what it can do, a features list, what snippet you would use it conjunction with etc. What would you say?

I am not looking for anything technical like how to write it into MODx or install it etc, but rather a super quick guide (for a client or end user perhaps?) that says "this is Ditto, this is why its cool, this is what it can do and this is where you should use it..." Sort of like a book publisher asked you to write the back cover of "Ditto for Dummies."

Thanks,

Max

My understanding:

Ditto is a page aggregator for MODx.

Example 1:
You have an empty container/folder called ’Cars’ with 3 different pages in it (Ferrari, Porsche, BMW). Ditto lets you aggregate all of these individual pages into one page. So now you have one page called ’Cars’ that includes all of the pages in the Cars folder (Ferrari, etc.)

Example 2:
What if have 100 cars and you want to sort them by date? Ditto has extra functionality called filters that lets you sort your "aggregation" by date. You could also sort by title, published_date, id, etc. Ditto also lets you choose whether to sort by ascending or descending values.

Example 3:
What if I want a page called automobiles that aggregates Cars, Trucks, and Jeeps? Ditto allows you to use multiple folders so you can aggregate pages from any section you would like and show them on your new ’Automobiles’ page.

Example 4:
What if I have 100 automobiles and only want to show 10 at a time? Ditto allows you to ’paginate’ your aggregation. This lets you decide how many pages to aggregate at a time and creates links to the other pages in the aggregation (page 1, page 2, page 3, etc.).

Why use Ditto?
Ditto lets you include an unlimited number of individual pages in one page. This opens up your website to a lot of design functionality and customization. It also allows you to split sections up to individual editors/authors while aggregating the information on one page.

ProWebscape says it well. Ditto is like a swiss army knife for displaying document data in various different formats. It took me some time before I got the courage to start using Ditto, it is a bit intimidating to get the grasp of. But in reality it is not that difficult and is very handy and extremely flexible.

I like the "swiss army knife" expression : it fits Ditto very well !

Is there something you can’t do to sort, list, display content with Ditto ?
So far I can’t think of one thing I have stumbled upon...

Ditto is at the heart of sorting, listing and displaying content with MODx, pure and simple.
MODx without Ditto wouldn’t be MODx for me...

Thanks for the responses. That’s pretty helpful.

Any thoughts on the how/when Ditto plays with other Snippets like NewsPublisher etc?

NewsPublisher creates and edits documents. Ditto aggregates and displays them.

Ditto also lets you easily present any of the document information in your aggregated display, formatted however you like.

If, for example, you have a bunch of news stories, articles (or just about anything else) each of which is a MODx document, Ditto will let you have a page that displays a short version of each one (or the most recent, or the 10 most recent, or all the ones by a particular author, or all the ones on a particular topic, etc., etc.)

For each one, you could show the document summary, the publication date, the author, and a link to the full version.

Bob

Would anyone mind if I put their description of Ditto on the Ditto support site?

Anything to help the cause

Quote from: Mark at Jan 06, 2008, 04:20 PM

Would anyone mind if I put their description of Ditto on the Ditto support site?

It’s fine with me.
Bob