Moving a Static Site to MODx?

Hello, I’ve been playing with MODx for awhile now, getting used to the different features and stuff, and I’m pretty sure (well, about 99.9% sure) I’m going to be using MODx for my site. Basically, it’s a pretty big site with several hundred pages (not sure exactly how many, but it’s around 400-ish I think), and the bulk of the content is made up of articles. It’s a plain old HTML site, nothing fancy, and it has a very basic tabled design. There are a few PHP pages that rely on a database (I have a gallery script, and a searchable database application I created a couple of months ago). I’m wondering: what’s the best way for me to move my current site over to MODx, without breaking everything?? Or, is there even a way to accomplish this?

Thanks for any suggestions!

You can import the static html pages; read this post to get started with the site import (there may be other posts about it, but wasn’t able to locate them at the moment).

For your gallery script and custom db app, the short answer is, you may just want to keep them as is and maybe setup weblinks in MODx to your existing pages for building any dynamic menus to those pages within your modx pages. Or, you could always turn them into snippets/plugins/etc. (or convert them to other existing snippets, in case of the gallery).

Hope that helps get you started.

Hey, that import thing is pretty nifty! I wanted to try it out, but I wasn’t quite sure how to. So basically, I remove all of the layout stuff around my main content on all my pages (which is probably easy enough, with DW’s search and replace), MODx can just take whatever’s left and put it into the content area of documents? :O

I’ll take a look at converting my scripts into snippets. I have another question about that though. Both the gallery and database script have login systems and I have several people adding content to them every other day or so. Would it be possible to integrate those with MODx itself so that I could create web users, and assign them permissions to those scripts? I mean, I guess it’s not *very* important, but it would be cool if it were possible.

Thanks for your help!

Quote from: Man at Aug 14, 2006, 01:10 AM

Hey, that import thing is pretty nifty! I wanted to try it out, but I wasn’t quite sure how to. So basically, I remove all of the layout stuff around my main content on all my pages (which is probably easy enough, with DW’s search and replace), MODx can just take whatever’s left and put it into the content area of documents? :O

That’s correct. I’ve imported and converted entire sites with twenty or thirty pages of content in less than an hour before. It’s really not that difficult, and this feature, though far from advanced, is very handy for migrating mostly static sites to MODx.

Quote from: Man at Aug 14, 2006, 01:10 AM

I’ll take a look at converting my scripts into snippets. I have another question about that though. Both the gallery and database script have login systems and I have several people adding content to them every other day or so. Would it be possible to integrate those with MODx itself so that I could create web users, and assign them permissions to those scripts? I mean, I guess it’s not *very* important, but it would be cool if it were possible.

There are events surrounding login and logout than you can create plugins to listen for, and within that code, you can do whatever you need to in order to synchronize users or just provide session data that your scripts might be using for security. Just depends on the scripts. This is how the SMF bridge is implemented, though the module aspect is just for configuration and maintenance; the plugins do the work.

The import is great. I’ve used it 3 times now and it’s a real timesaver.

Man or Animal: leave in the be sure to leave in the <title>Your Document Title</title> tags, as the title is picked up from there.

Actually, if your site has pages like <title>MySite - About Us</title> and <title>MySite - Introduction</title> then I recommend you search/replace out the "MySite - " because that bit can be added in with your template, and you’ll have cleaner title info, which is easier to manage all around.

If you don’t leave the title in, it picks up the title from the pagename I believe.