Is Modx the CMS/CMF for me?

I thought I’d ask this straight question, as you seem to be pretty straight talking around here, willing to the negatives or unsuitability of Modx for a particular need, as well as the positives.

I have a website and forum I am revamping, and would like to add blogging too. E-commerce will also be required, but my needs are light. I will, however, require the ability for automatic, paid for, downloads.

I would also like to add member blogging, where they can determin reply rights, and the ability to decide if read-access is public or member-only. When I say "blogging", I’d actually like for things to be more flexible than this, allowing members to create their own pages for pretty much what they wish, a home page, gallery, etc. -- A sort of "MySpace" lite, if you will.

Is Modx suitable for people who mostly will not be power-users? I could supply templates, I suppose, or some kind template options system. I don’t know, I’m unsure of what’s possible for someone, like me, who is getting pretty confident with compliant XHTML and CSS, unable to code, but willing to tweak where necessary. Whatever I set up, it will need to be easy for members to use, and hopefully flexible enough for the more creative and technically confident of them, to take things further. It must also be pretty straight forward for me to implement.

I note that you have just released an SMF bridge, that is great news, as I run an SMF forum. If I can gain the other features without additional logins, or further bridges to other software, that would be ideal.

Comments, and referrals to other threads/posts would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

I don’t honestly think you’ll find any solution out of the box. What you’re talking about is going to take a lot of work. You might be able to do it with some of the IPB tools, but I don’t really know.

HI Ryan,

I appreciate that there would be some work to do, and when I say "MySpace Lite", I only mean for members to be able to use html if they so desire. Maybe I should set up some tests to see for myself what’s posible. I know blogging is possible already, I just don’t want to be too prescriptive about what members can do with the space. I guess I’ll ask some questions in some dedicated threads.

Thanks.

You know, Ryan,

I’ve been reading through the documentation (excellent job by the way, most docs are dreadful), and Modx seems to work in the same way I think. I went down the Dreamweaver route with my site revamp (I had previously only used the most basic HTML), then to largely abandon DW, except that it can be handy for editing. I certainly don’t use it for "designing" webpages, and actually, don’t think I could. How anyone can design webpages without understanding the code, is beyond me!

So, I see Modx as a logical extension of XHTML/CSS, further separating content from layout, and styling. I was going to rely on hand-coding my main, more static, webpages, and use a CMS system for blogging, news, etc., but I think I will employ Modx for my static content now, as it makes complete sense to me. It says something about a system that I largely understand from the documentation, without installing the software, and only the most cursory experience with other CMS systems. Having looked at Joomla, I found it counter-intuitive, and that put me off of learning. It didn’t help that my questions were left unanswered at the forum; something that does not seem to happen much around here.

So, good forum, great documentation, and I trust, a fabulous CMS! - I’ll make a test installation tomorrow, and will try converting existing pages straight away.