A bit of a Rant!

This is a newbe rant ...

Visual Development Speed
I’m used to old-fashioned HTML and something like Dreamweaver to do design work, Xhtml is the way to go (the arguments for it etc and modx looks solid) but I’m finding it painful to go from the document / css model to modx it’s just not fast - (like old fashioned html was) what do other people use? How do you develop with modx / your graphic tools?

Templates to apply to the whole site
Also changing the whole look and feel via template’s I find slow (I seem to have to go into each page - enter edit mode then change template) is there a way to see all my site pages and which template they use and update the whole site for example?
With the click of one button?

Decent Hover Menus
The other issue is menus! I’d love a set of hover menus as a stock standard install (that layer on top of flash items!) after all web sites are just small applications they need multi level menu systems!

I understand that some stuff is out there that can extend modx menus (the step template is close) But this one feature would make modx the best cms by far.

Any thoughts ideas comments welcome

Thanks for putting up with my ranting!


Steve

In the Manager -> Administration -> Site Configuration you will find Default template. There you can change the site’s default template.

There are snippets and plugins available to allow for user-selected templates and inherited templates.

As far as menus go, MODx is in a stage of development where it is expected that the designer/developer has at least some knowlege of CSS; at least enough to be able to use the multitude of CSS list menu styling tutorial out on the Web. There are also a lot of contributed templates complete with CSS styling for their various forms of menus.

You can if you like make a template in Dreamweaver and easily adapt it to MODx, since the template system is based on plain HTML/CSS with content inserted via the various MODx tags. But the purpose of MODx is to provide a framework for Web applications and to manage content, not design sites.

Thanks for the reply!

"But the purpose of MODx is to provide a framework for Web applications and to manage content, not design sites."

Yes I’m aware of that but part of a design is how it handels content -
how it feels to move thru the site,
how the thing looks and works how it feels physicaly
How does it look when you get that content into it - ?

I suppose I’m asking what sort of visual development work flow are other people using?

Be sure to checkout Template Migration http://modxcms.com/template-migration.html.

regards,

zi

Quote from: steve_a at May 29, 2006, 07:41 AM

....
I suppose I’m asking what sort of visual development work flow are other people using?

I do design layout in graphic program like Fireworks then code it in XHTML/CSS. Put some sample content (e.g. Lorum Ipsum blah blah). OR you can generate the content in MODx via putting a simple template with necessary TVs and then save the generated html source code in a file. Open it in your favourite editor and apply CSS styles with Live preview.

When you done with everything replace the template code in MODx with your final bits.

This is my way to design MODx templates.

Hope this helps.

regards,

zi

I create a mock up in Photoshop. This allows me to create the graphics at the same time, and also the client can approve it/make changes easily enough.
I create a specification for the structure of the site. Client can approve this/modify it also.

From these two items I can create:

- the actual graphics
- the templates for the various sections
- the CSS that I need
- list the snippets that I need for functionality

Then it’s simply a matter of putting it together.

Andy