Installing a 3rd party snippet...

So I’ve been looking into a lot of CMS’s, and it seems that MODx has a lot of potential to be exactly what I’m looking for... I’d really like to settle on this one.

I’m trying to do a site for a church that my relative pastors. They are going with an expensive outsourced system right now, and I told him I could work on something to get them away from what they are doing now.

It needs the following features to match what they have right now: Calendar, link directory, article module (to hold his weekly sermons (I guess that would be the best place to put them)), and a news module (to hold announcements).... I think that’s it.

So I found this calendar snippet in this forum:
http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,2318.0.html

I downloaded it, but I couldn’t find any instructions on actually installing snippets. I’ve checked the documentation which has instructions for creating new snippets, but I didn’t see anything about installing existing 3rd party ones. I checked this forum, but I didn’t see any generic snippet installation instructions. The logical thing to me was to give it a directory in the /assets/snippets/ directory, but that didn’t work.

So, the main thing I’m asking about is how I can install a snippet like this so I can use this calendar.

But some minor topics that I’d like to know eventually include:
- Is this calendar that I’m trying probably the best calendar snippet out there to use?
- Are the other things (link dir., news, articles) pre-packaged?

I’d really appreciate some help here, because I’d like to settle on MODx... Seems like a really progressive project.

You are correct; I have added a section to the Adding Snippets documentation. I hope this helps.

http://modxcms.com/adding-snippets.html

Usually a package will have a README or INSTALL document included in the archive with basic installation and usage instructions, but the calendar snippet is still a work-in-progress, although quite usable as it is. The actual snippet code which you need to copy/paste into the Manager’s new snippet form is in the "resources" folder.

Ah, thanks for the installation info! Hmm, looks like another solid reason to go with MODx... A friendly, helpful community in which I’d like to be involved...

groovecenter,

Just wanted to throw in my .02 worth. We are currently wrapping up a large (1000+) congregation church web site we were hired to develop. Modx was the system we settled on after a disasterous brush with Joomla (shudder). If you would like to see how we handled some of the issues religious organizations deal with in a web presence you can see the (almost) live site at www.iky.cc/modx/ any questions feel free to ask here in this thread or in another.

As to the community I can not say enough about them. they are not your normal forum/tech/geek/ literati. I know, I have been some sort of I.T. for 15 years... and these guys rock the house.


cheers,
JT

groovenectar,

I should be responsible to that.
I created that snippet, but I never actually finish it up. It’s being installed on one of our client’s website, and so far everything works allright, except ofr that fact that they never actually use it

There are a lot of good full-fledge calendar system out there, if you want to integrate it into MODx. If you want a simple one, I think there is a simple snippet for creating calendar using MODx documents.

If you know about PHP, then go with the one that I built. It’s still raw, but there are a lot of features in it that you can extend. If I have 30 hours a day, I would love to chip in some of my time in finishing up this snippet, but I don’t think I have that priviledge. Lets see what I can do in the next 2 months.

@jwtyler
Cool, thanks for the link. The site looks really great! I see you’re using an off-site 3rd party calendar. I’ll have to look into that, though I’d like to use an integrated solution. Hehh, I actually tried a Joomla install for this church site as well, and it has also been deleted. Since we’re both working on church sites, perhaps we could exchange ideas at some point... Maybe through a forum thread for the benifit of anyone else working on a similar project. I’ll keep an eye on the progress of your church’s site, and once the one I’m working on is usable, I’ll post a link to that as well.

@Djamoer
Oh, cool! You have done a fine job with this; I’ve seen the demos, but have not yet sat down and integrated it myself. Looking through the forums, I’ve only seen two calendar solutions, and yours seems to be the superior one. I was looking for one that has a full monthly calendar view, which it does. I don’t think the other one has one. Integrating a large PHP calendar application project (e.g. WebCalendar) seems like it would be a really daunting task. It’d be nice to have something that can be managed right from within the MODx admin interface. I’m quite proficient with PHP, so hopefully I won’t run into any installation/ implementation/ customization problems that will get me stuck. Thanks for making that snippet!

I’ll bet at some point there will be a section of the MODx main site that will house snippets and plugins. I think that would be neat. It was actually kind of hard to find the two calendar snippets on the forum, and then harder to be sure that I was grabbing the latest version. I’m still not entirely sure that I’ve got the latest version, but hopefully I do.

I do understand that. We’re still in the middle of workong on this repository things. All core users are way too busy in working for the next upcoming release 0.9.2, while it left only me and some other loyal users here that are discussing on how this thing should be done correclty.

So keep following the progress on MODx, I’m sure you won’t disappointed