MODx suitability for production sites?

Does anyone in the community here want to comment on experiences using MODx for production sites with medium traffic [eg 1000-3000 uniques/day]?

I am impressed at a technical level with MODx, but i haven’t seen too many examples of substantial sites running using it. I am building a site for a music venue and independent record company, incorporating weblog, streaming audio, a schedule for the venue, and a full on restaurant that requires bookings online, and basic ecommerce (for the moment a one page merchandise page + cart).

Are there examples of anything this complex in the community? As I said in another post, we started out with Textpattern (which I quite like), but debates in that community about the direction of the Textpattern project recently have me looking for other options.

Drupal is my other main candidate, because of the well developed range of plugins that address many needs. But i hate Drupal’s templating system, which is Textpattern’s strength, and something that MODx does in a similar to TP but better way.

I’m an experienced PHP developer, and I also develop for OS X, and the whole model-view-controller approach (including bindings!) is great with MODx for me.

That said, I’m interested in stories of non-tech people learning and using MODx as day to day maintainers and content creators, since those people need to be catered to in the case of my current project. To put this in context, the current maintainer of the site basically lost the contract when, in response to a feature request from the client, he said that the best way to deal with it was for the people who use the system to learn HTML, CSS and so on. So expectations of steep learning curves won’t fly.

Your experiences?

MODxcms.com runs it and sustains more than a million page views a month. Several universities with thousands of pages and hundreds of content editors likewise run it. I’d say yes.

We’d love to have you on board and contributing to the community!

I am using it on a website with an average unique visitors of 20.000 a month, and MODx is running smoothly...

Go for it!

Quote from: omnivore at Mar 29, 2006, 03:12 PM

That said, I’m interested in stories of non-tech people learning and using MODx as day to day maintainers and content creators, since those people need to be catered to in the case of my current project. To put this in context, the current maintainer of the site basically lost the contract when, in response to a feature request from the client, he said that the best way to deal with it was for the people who use the system to learn HTML, CSS and so on. So expectations of steep learning curves won’t fly.

Your experiences?

With RTE’s availale it is easy for anyone who can use a word processor to add content. However there is a small catch, as with any RTE (except one commercial one) there will be tag soup. This is not MODx fault but the lack of standards compliant RTE’s.

If you don’t need XHTML 1.0 strict and compliance with WCAG etc, then it will be fine. I ended up turning off RTE’s and using Markdown so they just had to learn to uses *’s and #’s for things. Unfortunately that doesn’t work too well with images as there is no resource browser for it.

So in my opinion you have to decide if you want ease of use or 100% standard compliant?

Quote from: omnivore at Mar 29, 2006, 03:12 PM

So expectations of steep learning curves won’t fly.

Your experiences?

We’re documenting and pictorializing a modx site building and admin experience from the ground up

Here

http://www.modxhost.com/

The entry levels will be finished in a week or so - we’ll gradually cover more advanced subjects once a solid background picture has been drawn so there’s no confusion how all the pieces fit together

We’re documenting and pictorializing a modx site building and admin experience from the ground up

That’s great. It’ll be a great resource.

I’m moving forward on an in-depth assessment of MODx with the blessing of the client, and the day I spent with it was amazingly productive.

I had already sold the client on using Textile, and I think that I will probably continue with that, since it makes it hard for newbies to screw up, but leaves advanced users able to add classes and id’s to blocks etc. I have to say that the edit in place slickness of MODx had the client very excited...

I have another, related question about the ability of MODx to adapt to scheduling requirements, but I’ll post that as a separate thread.

Thanks for your answers, more welcomed.