Template Design Standard (suggestion)

Quote from: bugsmi0 at Mar 16, 2006, 10:49 AM

Also if you are not a truly gifted CSS master then you have no busniess making templates ok now i’m really going to get punched for this he he.

Ummm, so everyone is born a CSS master then? How are people going to become a master unless they start somewhere, and I’m sure thier first designs are pretty crap. (and I’m not saying Banzai’s design is crap either, hes done some good designs)

I’m no CSS master or guru, but thanks to MODx I am learning heaps. My current site was my first CSS attempt, now I am making small changes to the CSS to make it more flexible for future enhnacements (currently in Sandbox).

Thats the power of MODx, it allows somone like me with no skills to design a fully standards compliant site the way I WANT[b] not the way the devlopers thought I might like.

Quote from: pierinux at Mar 16, 2006, 03:43 PM

This problem of "childish" template design is indeed very common among CMSs’. If you browse through official templates - i.e. - or Wordpress you’ll find one or two which are worth using, the others are just rubbish. The same applies to what I’ve seen around in ModX.

There are no Official Templates other than those that shipped with MODx. The closest, is a mention of the galaxy template on the resources page, however those resources are just contributions from community members, they aren’t offical MODx releases.

I think we have to remember that we all have different tastes, ideas, needs and opinons. What we all share is a desire to achive those with MODx as the [b]framework.

he he, yes i’ll create the first master peeps,

i often speak in forked tongues so bare that in mind and feel free to tongeslap me if necessary

I’m sure glad, I wasn’t the one who stated some of them templates out on the web are rubbish

Contrary to the popular american idol show, not everyone is a winner, some just plain suck and have no talented but that’s not to say they don’t have the potential.

Nobody is born a css expert, but if you are going to design sites do it the right way, it takes much more then putting up 3 colums with some text and some color to make it a good design. You know its bad when you can check out 200 templates and maybe only 3 showed promise and even then you’d have to combine all three to recreate a new template species. That’s usually how I do it lol.

I completely understand Modx’s take on things, I still believe template design is what’s going to draw people to CMS, the end user doesn’t care how the code works they just want a easy to manage way of setting up their site.

It’s true at first sight, it was scary for me but then i started throwing out some html and realize how much better it is then using joomla with all its wacked coding. Modx is a breath of fresh air even if i don’t have a clue about a chunk a snippet or a tv,

Quote from: rthrash at Mar 16, 2006, 04:42 PM

In totally unrelated news, I’m also happy to announce that Andreas Viklund is joining the core team. Think that situation might change in the coming months?

Man, how can I have missed that !!!

Quote from: bugsmi0 at Mar 16, 2006, 08:59 PM

I completely understand Modx’s take on things, I still believe template design is what’s going to draw people to CMS, the end user doesn’t care how the code works they just want a easy to manage way of setting up their site.

I totally agree with this, but as you already know, making MODx templates easy to use/load/modify/create by  the average users does not score very high on MODx dev team priority list. They are more interested in super dupper uber geeky users than average joes.
MODx is their baby and they can do what the f*ck they want with it, but it does not stop me to think they are dead wrong on this specific subject, and it still pisses me off as I really like this CMS as a CMS. Not a techno tool to please coders.

LOL Mr Frog,

Unfortunately hordes of end users asking for free support (and many hours of it a day I might add) and trying to learn how to build a CSS template does not keep a roof over the Dev Team’s head. Unless you’d like to sponsor the effort of course. But that’s going to take high-six to low-seven figures to pull off properly.

Put another way, would you agree to allow me to land job after job, demand that you do them for me (promptly, but politely, but sometimes selfishly and demanding), and never send you a single penny/pence/franc/yen/ruble. I would however compensate you with loads of praise about how cool you are and what a wonderful job you do.

If you’ll go for that I’ll gladly take you up on the offer!

I have seven grandchildren, and never laid a finger on a computer until less than a year before my first grandchild was born. I am a high-school graduate, the first such in my family, and only two of my children ever finished high school. I come from a poor, uneducated background, and taught myself all that I know. I can manage a Linux network, have written assembly language utitlities for DOS systems, and now do pretty good with LAMP technology, all on my lonesome. I’ve been told by computer shop owners to go home and knit booties for my grandchildren. I’ve been told I’m too old. I’ve been told computers aren’t something for girls to do. I’ve had my sexual orientation questioned. But I damned will did it anyway, and even if I do say so myself I do it pretty well. I’ve run my own computer repair and office networking business. And I’m apparently fairly useful on this project. I’m nothing special, not particularly clever or talented. I never whined and demanded that somebody else make it easier for me. My point? Everything you need to learn is freely available on the Internet. If I can do it, so can you...so can anybody.

ditto.

Faz, I didn’t know you were a Grandmother living in the desert plains of Israel next to a huge meteor crater!

Quote from: rthrash at Apr 08, 2006, 02:38 PM

Faz, I didn’t know you were a Grandmother living in the desert plains of Israel next to a huge meteor crater!

:D !

*zi is rolling on floor laughing*

Quote from: bugsmi0 at Mar 16, 2006, 08:59 PM

I still believe template design is what’s going to draw people to CMS, the end user doesn’t care how the code works they just want a easy to manage way of setting up their site.

This I agree with thinking as a newbie and wanting to pull things apart to see how everything worked as a fast track to reading tutorials or forum threads (hahaha). But, I actually wouldn’t have cared too much what the templates looked like because I was more interested in how snippets and TV’s worked in relation to an output and how that was managed inside modX - then, taking that information and making it work with one of our own templates. Then, measuring what it can do in relation to what ’one of our’ average clients seeks to communicate to the world and knowing, from that rather protracted process of evaluation, that our css xhtml templates can be delivered ’with’ modX if a client wants something more than a static site, and secondly, promoting modX as a ’more appropriate’ cms/cmf to the developers we work for and having them take on modX so our tableless css designs are treated right >:(

So, we’re releasing 50 templates after the tutorial sites finished simply because we have them there to adapt and we want to attempt to cover as many practical business scenario’s as possible and showcase, to (our client/developers - and a public release) how modX handles various situations which at the end of the day makes our job easier - and by that I mean skinning for modX isn’t really ’skinning’ - it works with any old css xhtml tableless template and that’s something a lot of people can’t completely get their head around. Our job is therefore made easier as far as we’re concerned since modX delivers ’with’ the css - and that’s how we see it

... isn’t it interesting how modX is/becomes a lot of different things, to as many people

oh, and in the proces of making our job easier - giving something back to modX