Desperate situation - can MODx save us?

Hello all!

I am the webmaster of a review website run by a bunch of professional journalists. We have been coding our own new CMS to bring our website to the next level. Unfortunately, our main coder had to leave, leaving the coding job on our CMS 50% done. We basically are left with a series of a disjointed functions - all these are needed in an ideal CMS (they include, for example, the possibility to download files directly from remote servers onto our server, even if these servers have advanced web based authentication that usually require a web browser).

We have been looking in the latest week for a CMS, or better still, a CM framework that can serve as a strong base for our existing code. We need functions like workflow management, support for multiple types of content or possibility to create new types of content starting from a mysql table layour. For example, in our website we have News, articles, reviews, and each of these has a different structure. Finally, we need to implement a static files generation tool, since we need to use static pages when possible to reduce server load and to have true user friendly urls without having to use Apache rewrite functions.

Needless to say, a portal system or a blog focused system isn’t what we need. Do you think MODx can help us or we should look elsewhere?

In any case, thank you for creating this amazing CMS - it seems definitely one of the most advanced and "clean" available to the open source community!

Thanks!

Thank you for the kind words! Most of what you ask is already built into MODx. The only feature you mention that is not an "out of the box" feature is workflow management but there is a clever workaround to that. Being the guru of NewsListing I can certainly say that having multiple sections like News, articles, reviews is a piece of cake. MODx has a static file export tool built in that AFAIK can output FURLS.

Hope this helps!

Hi Harry,

I believe that MODx will serve as a right framework for your website. I don’t know about the workload of your website, as we really need to try MODx being tested in terms of performance wise, like being slashdotted, and etc. But, as far as building the kind of website that you want, I do really believe that MODx is the right way for yout to use.

Everything that you want had been implemented inside MODx system or snippets. If you have other things, you can implement it either using plugin/snippets, which is that’s a big advantage of MODx compare to other system. All you need to know is only the terms and how to use, the rest, if you’re PHP programmer, you know what you need to do to build it.

If you want to export the site to html, than you come to the right place, we have a build in export system, if you’re asking about permission in uploading articles, than it’s been implemented, if you are asking about file manager, then it’s time for you to start building it from scratch maybe, because right now MODx doesn’t have a full-fledge file management system, other than the one on fckeditor or the simple file manager on the admin section.

Hope that answer your questions. If you have any other question, feel free to ask support in this forum.

Thanks a lot for your kind, informative, and fast replies. We will install MODx, so hopefully you should see me around the forums often! Really, your replies and MODx gave me new hope our project is actually doable!

Also, it’s amazing to hear you have also static export tool - this is so rare in open source CM frameworks!

Thanks!

Hope you enjoy your stay in here

Indeed! I was just looking through the documentation, and I am very very pleased to see that user backend management is separated from website user management! This is a requirement that seems missing in most CMS, maybe because they are designed only with the blogger in mind.

Just one question: Mark mentioned there is a good work around for workflow (even though we could code it, I think) - what’s that? Or is there a topic about it?

Thanks again!

There has to be a discussion about this in forum, but I’m not to for sure where it’s at.

Another note, the current manager and web user will be combined in the future release. You can search forum to find discussion about this topic.

Though they will be combined, there will still be separate contexts for manager vs. front-end user credentials, so you can login and out of different contexts without affecting your session in any other context( s ) you may be logged into. This makes development and debugging a snap, as you can test your front-end authentication and permissions without affecting your manager login, which otherwise would have to be compromised if you logged in/out from the front-end to test.

Here’s the recent topic on workflow... http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,2048.0.html
and there are many others if you search for ’work flow’ here in the forums.

Installed it with no problems on our server. This leaves me with one final question before starting - how painful are upgrades to following versions? I mean, if we try to write a module for our production website, how difficult will it be to port it to a next version?

Speaking of the frontend authentication, we might decide to handle everything with our own community/forum software, regardless of the cm framework.

Thanks again for your time everyone!

Upgrades have been very smooth so far, from any version to just about any other; point in case I just upgraded two Etomite 0.6 sites with the original MODx2 mods to the latest 0.9.1 yesterday with no problems (other than accidentally translating my db content from Latin-1 to UTF-8 in my migration SQL scripts, duh )!