ModX for Multi-user PhotoBlog?

hey all,

I am coming from a background in TextPattern (and lately Drupal). ModX looks inviting and I’d love to try it. I have a specific project that I’ve got to build and I’m wondering if the experts could offer some advice. I have searched the forums and I am not seeing relevant posts.

Is it possible, using ModX, to build a site where registered users can post/upload images and other users can comment on them? Sort of like a multi-user photoblog (every user gets an image blog w/commenting). Also looking to provide ranking/tagging so that the images getting the most interest float to the top of the home page. Possible with ModX?

Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide.

Yes, it’s possible, but not without writing some code. MODx doesn’t limit what you can do - it provides a basis for building what you want.

User login already exists - it’s called web users.
Blog entry/comment snippets already exist.

You can add a new table to your database which stores the image, the web user that uploaded and the rating.
Write a snippet that is on a page only web users can see that allows image upload (i.e. presents an upload form, etc.). When the image is uploaded store the image in a folder and add to database. Also create a document for the image showing the image. You can also use Maxigallery here as well for thumbnails, etc.
Write another snippet for entering ratings for images and add this along with the blog/comment snippets to the image documents.
Write a snippet that looks through the table and sorts according to ratings and put this on your home page.

A shortcut might be to simply use the features of the existing blog snippets that allow images hosted elsewhere to be displayed. This would remove you of the large burden of hosting 1000s or 10,000s of images. You could extend those snippets to include ratings.

Anyway, there are probably better ways to do it, but the above is how I would start.

Andy

Thanks for the reply. I kind of got that impression from extensive reading of the forums and examining all the existing modules. I was hoping for a more elegant solution, one that doesn’t involve writing code or directly touching the DB. I mean, why bother using ModX at all...I could code my own CMS if I wanted to do it that way.

Sounds like I have to stick with Drupal for this type of multi-user project.

I think that MODx is an elegant solution to the problem of creating a general purpose framework, upon which you can build. I don’t think the method I suggested is a lot of work and I think that of the total solution MODx provides maybe 80% of the effort. So I beg to differ that writing your own CMS would be easier.

Good luck with your project.

Andy

With maxigallery you can do galleries for webusers or webgroups and you can use replix with it to achieve picture commenting.. but for the voting, you would need to modify css star voting snippet that can be found from the download repository to set the votes per picture. The you can modify maxigallery solo for example to get the pictures based on votes etc.. not that hard really. But I don’t know what other CMS’es offer straight out of the box..

Hey thanks, I really appreciate the fast replies.

I will take a look at maxigallery.