Template Design Standard (suggestion)

Quote from: French at Apr 09, 2006, 11:59 PM

I still don’t get it. Of course I understand that your work on MODx is immense and that it represents countless hours of work. But as you are already not making any money on MODx what would you lose if you were developping a CMS that is more "dumb*users*like*me" friendly ?
I don’t understand your question as you already not paid for what you do

There are many talented coders and software engineers out there designing software to make the jobs they do easier to do. Some of them have been gracious enough to share their works with the world. others have gone extra lengths to release their work under the GPL (MODx, Etomite, Linux, etc...). They do this because the end is useful to the task at hand, and they, in their infinite generosity, have taken notice that others may also find it useful. So they share... they improve, and they devlop as a community with something in common. MODx and the like are here as a direct result of generosity and belief in the benfits open development. They did not come around because billion dollar industries hired them to make something simple that everyone in their corporation could use. That is a paid CMS. MODx does not have the luxury of ample funds to support the programmers in a way that they can devote all their time to it’s development and improvement. If that is what you need, many of the programmers here may be available to hire as Ry mentioned above (hope ya got 6 figs!). If you want something many people seem to find useful, something you have the right to develop and improve yourself if you are so inclined (you not only have that right, you are highly encouraged to do so!). You do not have the right to tell these people that the software is worthless to you because you don’t know how to use it properly. French Frog, If the MODx team gave you a free horse, you would check it’s teeth.

later

-sD-

Well, having had horses, I’d actually have a veterinarian check its teeth!

Nothing to add to the heating debate, I’ll re-focus on the issue at hand : the templating system.

One more time that it’s not a matter of being elitist : if the template system was built to be one-click-simple it would NEVER be that flexible ! We had this discussion a million times with newbies coming from WordPress to Textpattern !!

You can’t have a system highly praised by designers that will also be praised by "end users". MODx or Textpattern are made by people who wanted to give people who know what they do (e.g know HTML and CSS fairly well) a system that wouldn’t work against their freedom as designers but that would allow them to continue showcasing their design talent AND have the benefits of a dynamic website.

What does it mean ? It means that the most natural thing to do to help designer do so is build a tag system that would mix well with another tag language such as HMTL and allow to control where you want to put the content and how you want to style it.

It’s not a coincidence if both Textpattern and MODx offer a second level of control, a "micro templating system" if you will, e.g txp offer "forms" to template the content generated by a given tag, and MODx snippets offers chunks to template the generated result, itself containing placeholders. I call it "granular control" and that’s why MODx or Txp have no match to build custom designs while doing so with Joomla, e107 or any one-click system is a real pain... Of course, you’ll say : custom designs can be done with those. And it can : but how long will it take you ? Without granular control, content re-use, you’ll end up hacking the core code or the plugins to get exactly what you want... or you’ll compromise and your website will be formatted the way it is on countless websites run with such systems.

Now is it possible to make a one-click system even for MODx ? Yeah, probably. It also possible to do that for Textpattern, but it never happened. Why ? Because it’s not built to work that way, it’s not built to be easy but it’s built to be powerful (yet, I find MODx pretty "natural" to learn and not that difficult !). That’s what most user appreciate about those systems, they don’t want another rigid system, they want flexiblity, they want control over design. It’s rare enough for us not to want to waste it...

That doesn’t mean it wont get done by someone, someday. Let’s remember : anyone can feel free to write an install system for templates ! One bad side effect is, as pointed out earlier, users wouldn’t learn the system by auto-installing templates. There is a learning curve for MODx, as for any powerful tool... skip it, and you’ll end up doing support 24/7 with little or no reward and, more importantly : no improvement to the system.

Think about it : did you notice how many things have been improved in MODx by advanced users and professionnals ? Did you install those great snippets, plugins and modules written by developpers and designers outside the dev team ? This is really one key thing about MODx, the contributions. Would those snippets, plugins, modules, bug fix, suggestions keep on coming as fast as they do if those people were doing support for endusers instead of writing great code ? Plus, it would wear them out quickly, I have seen this happen...

It’s not only a matter of target : as I said, we of course aim the end-user but of course not in the sense of end-users building websites. Of course, it’s a professionnal’s perspective. Doesn’t mean you can’t build great websites as an amateur, but the target here is rather "pro-ams", those "geeks" and power users that came up earlier. Again, people knowing what they do.

You can’t possibly teach the basics to everyone (we do help with some basic things already, and never talk down to anyone, I guess you already noticed that. But there is only so much you can do). The MODx team has been doing the smart thing by focusing resources where they should be. And it shows off : quick release cycle, a growing reputation among professionnals, more and more corporate website built with MODx, a rapidly growing community and enthusiast users... etc.

Hi,

I’m very happy to read that i am a member of an "elite".
I’m surprise too, because to be a member, it’s enough to know how to :
- use a ftp client to create a folder an copy somes files
- do a copy/paste of a text

I am sorry, I have a big problem, I read the documentation. It’s bad, no?
And my best problem, I want to understand what y do, so i read le site du zéro.

Last point, Modx is not so hard to understand if your brain is on. It’s more difficult to create a template to joomla with pattemplate than create a template to Modx.

Quote from: aour at Apr 10, 2006, 05:10 AM

Last point, Modx is not so hard to understand if your brain is on. It’s more difficult to create a template to joomla with pattemplate than create a template to Modx.

Thats because modX doesn’t exactly need templates, it works with any css xhtml tableless design, and less.

The tricky part is firing up all the snippets and understanding how everything slots together with the css xhtml tableless design

But that’s how we see it from where we are right now - we expect to have a completely different point of view in a months time.... erm, well - thats the plan right ?

Quote from: Starbuck at Apr 10, 2006, 05:31 AM

The tricky part is firing up all the snippets and understanding how everything slots together with the css xhtml tableless design

Once you understand how to use tags to call snippets and set parameters (some of them allow you to define CSS class names), and for some snippets how to use chunks and placeholders to control the output code, you’ll have it nailed

Quote from: Starbuck

But that’s how we see it from where we are right now - we expect to have a completely different point of view in a months time.... erm, well - thats the plan right ?

Not sure I get it, but if I understand correctly you expect to have this mastered in a month time ?
I’d say less...

Quote from: davidm at Apr 10, 2006, 05:36 AM

Not sure I get it, but if I understand correctly you expect to have this mastered in a month time ?
I’d say less...

*lol* we’re trying not to get ahead of where the tutorial’s at, which almost happened, a few days back so we put the brakes on.

For sure we could mix it up a little and throw everything in at the risk of the tutorial going through a worm-hole and ending up reading like a scientific guide to getting more out of modX than you’d ever need

True the curve isn’t that big unless one is trying to write like someone who just found modx, oh the pain... all these goodies, and I can’t play with them yet

Duh, I wasn’t awake it seems, of course with modxhost.com there are lots of things explained step by step (how could I miss that !)... no excuses to say it’s hard to learn

Quote from: ScottyDelicious at Apr 10, 2006, 02:12 AM

You do not have the right to tell these people that the software is worthless to you because you don’t know how to use it properly. French Frog, If the MODx team gave you a free horse, you would check it’s teeth.

And you do not have the right to put these words in my mouth as I NEVER said such a thing.

as a reminder, 2 posts before yours, that is what I posted :

Well MODx is an excellent tool for making websites, and I am already using it no matter what

Scotty, I am sure you can show your support to the team view without using such methods.

To end this interesting conversation, between all of you and only me , I will simply continue to use MODx, battle with templates switching and snippets/Tv migration, and just wait for a more user friendly version that I am sure will come soon. I guess I don’t have much choice anyway, and even if MODx is a pain time to time, it is still one of the best CMS available. Even if I wanted I would not have the right to close my eyes on it