Hello guys and gals! My first post here, so greetings to everyone.
Thx a lot to the
founders of MODx that gave birth to this marvellous baby and to the community that will help growing it up, as it should. Hats off to
David M. for the brilliant presentation help and guidance he gave to everyone over at Webmaster’s Hub.
Merci bcp David, sans toi je n’aurai pas connu MODx. This became a long intro but I really care to give it properly ‘coz nowdays picking up a good CMS with web standards in mind and a powerful API is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Finding one is like breathing pure air.
Overview
This might be a long post to read as I like to keep things ordered and give enough details to help you out figuring out proper suggestions.
My partner and I were approached by an association that needs a complete redesign of their actual site. As always with small companies and assos all the web projects, are not in the top priorities list and left for the last minute, so we are in a really short delay to get the job done. Hence we didn’t opt for a specific dev from scratch, but instead we started looking around for a good CMS that will take off from our shoulders an important part of the job. Most of the others CMS we have experienced with in the past, are either too complicated, not enough adaptable or do not fully respect the web standards. There are a series of technical implications that I’ll try to describe as best as I can as we are still in the analysis stage and we still are trying to better understand the use of tv, chunks and snippets as the fundamental elements to personalize that future site.
We have to start off from an already validated art design, which we have to fully respect so we have no
“carte blanche” in the way we will represent the content. We have the psd files for each and every page and the look should stick to them. Go here to see a quick mock-up of the front-page I made for you guys, so when we’ll talk about blocks numbers later on, you’ll know what I have in mind.
http://img525.imageshack.us/img525/3272/mockup3dt.jpg
Now back to business
Designing the blocks.
As you see the site is composed in classic blocks. There are 2 issues with the blocks:
-There are block that repeat themselves in several pages. I think that’s where tv, chunks and snippets will come to play their role. If we figured it out correctly on how they work, we should integrate those tags into the template to show the blocks where we would like them to be. That’s ok if the blocks were to stay in one place in all the pages they’re needed to appear. In fact they don’t; we have block 4 being displayed for example in page 4 on the placeholder of block 1, in page 5 on placeholder of block 3 etc. So we have repeated content, moving in different places in different pages. Do you think the best idea would be to make per page templates?
-Pushing content to blocks, from manager interface.
We will be working on pixel basis for this site and that makes it difficult to push content in some blocks like Block3 that includes 4 other Blocks with precise sizes. I thought a good way to look at it was to use create 4 pages for every block a, b, c and d and style it up to fit the specified size. Is that the way to go? What is your reflection on the thumbnails next to them? From an editor perspective it’s ok to include a photo next to the text using the wysiwyg functions for the full pages that each block will open up, but how to push a summary in the frontpage with a thumbnailed photo next to them? Doing that without modifying the database and some php coding, that’s a mystery to us.
Contact form
I was pleased to see that you made it easy to make up a form with several subject options that can be sent to different email addresses. I’ll be in need to put a link in a “Page X” that will fire up the contact form and automatically select as a subject “Question X” and same thing for “Page Y” that would select “Question Y”. Is this something that can be accomplished using snippets or should we code this the hard way?
Content in a pop-up
There are contents to be added to the site that would require not full pages as there are just a couple of lines + a photo. Although I do NOT like pop-ups at all, I wasn’t able to argument a change on this. If we had a classic content page, there wouldn’t be any problem firing up a pop-up using the wysiwyg functions. However in our case we want to associate that pop-up with the “read more..” link of the summary text. Any ideas how to work that out?
Limiting the image size
We would like that all the full content pages that contain images use images of a given size. We considered the easiest way was to point the editors to use any classic image utility software. Using a batch process to auto-size images to our dimensions and then update them, was not the taste of our client. They want to cut all the extra tools in the editing workflow process and want to use images of whatever size they have and it’s our job to restrict the size that the images are displayed. What about that huh? Who mentioned
imagecopyresampled() ?
Archive or Library
I haven’t gone yet into details about the archiving functions of MODx, so sorry if this is has been covered. We would like that at some point in time the editors choose to archive pages into the Archives or the Library (the name hasn’t been decided yet). That cannot be necessarily only using publishing/expiration functions. They would like as well to add pages directly to the archive/library. We think it will be a good idea to create an archive/library folder, so the editors would add manually content pages into this folder. The trick is moving around expired pages. We would like to manage let’s say last week editorial which expired Monday. Is there any way to move pages to a given Folder (like Archives/Library) upon their expiration date and republish once inside that folder? If removing expired documents is done manually is there any way to republish them automatically by playing around with the parent folder status? All this so the editors won’t have to do several actions to get something done.
AJAX implementation
We have a page where we thought to include some flash content because we wanted to have this effect
http://www.aflax.org/examples/video3/video.html . Then the content kept growing so it was not an option anymore for the sake of content searching within the site and from the SE robots. Any pointers on how-to achieve that effect using AJAX in MODx?
That’s all for the moment folks. If you’re still awake and reading these lines, I’m already thankful for the time you took. Any form of input to this thread will be more than welcome. I could advance in this project with your help and let you know of the advancement as it can help anyone when working on a site, under specific conditions from the client.
Cheers
p.s. smoke time.
!
!!!
)
