Can MODx replace Dreamweaver?

Hi all:

I’m brand new to CMS’s and not 100% certain what they’re capable of. I’ve been doing web design for years with Dreamweaver. I’m wondering if MODx is something that I can now create all my work with rather than Dreamweaver. I’m experienced with PHP, MySQL, Perl, and JavaScript so if any new "language" is needed to use this, then I am willing to try because MODx looks exciting. I also run several forum communities with SMF and seeing that this forum is also powered by SMF, hopefully there will be easy integration between the two.

MODx doesn’t do design things, but is a tool to manage content inside your designs. With that said, if you’re using DW to manage your sites, I think you’ll find MODx provides a great productivity boost to ongoing site maintenance, and works from pretty much any machine with a web connection.

So the design part is done how? Is this what people refer to as themes?

Design is handled however you’d like to handle it. MODx is not a design application; it manages whatever you put into it.

You put your design in templates. I’d suggest starting your learning adventure with the documentation, http://wiki.modxcms.com/ and http://modxhost.com/

You desing your page layouts first with any tools you want, may it be dreamweaver, stylemaster or notepad. Then when your site layout is ready (eg. html code, images and css) you copy paste the html code in to modx as new template, ftp the images over to your server in to the path that template code is referring to, put the css codes as document in modx and link it to your template or ftp it to your server. Then you set the modx tags (eg. [*content*], [*pagetitle*]) + own made template variables (eg. [*mysideblock*] or whatever) + chunks (eg. {{footer}} or other reusable content) / snippets (eg. [[MyMenu]] etc) to the template where you want your content to show up and that’s it.

Then you create new pages to your site by creating documents in modx manager and selecting your template as a template for the page.

Wiki fodder!

Quote from: rthrash at Oct 18, 2006, 12:22 PM

Design is handled however you’d like to handle it. MODx is not a design application; it manages whatever you put into it.

You put your design in templates. I’d suggest starting your learning adventure with the documentation, http://wiki.modxcms.com/

I have been looking at the wiki. I think it’s still new as there are a lot of empty topics and I wasn’t finding much info for "beginner" design.
Quote from: rthrash at Oct 18, 2006, 12:22 PM

and http://modxhost.com/

Wow, this is a great link. Thanks!

Quote from: rthrash at Oct 18, 2006, 12:29 PM

Wiki fodder!

Use this page to list stuff from forums that deserve its place in wiki article. That goes to all of you!

I think what you’ll find, or at least what I am finding, and what will excite you most, is that the underlying "theme" or template, is little different that any of the sites you’ve already developed. From my also limited CMS exposure, MODx is probably the cleanest for being able to literally drop in your existing design. If you developed with DW templates, you are way on your way (though I’ve tended to avoid them) or even if you just developed a "temp" or dummy page that you used to build a site with, same idea.

Chunks are very much like DW library items... allowing you to display the same content all over and being able to centralize any changes to it.

After that, things get bumped up a few notches based on the dynamic capabilities... Snippets might be compared to php includes and TVs (Template Variables... though I’m still battling to get TV as in television out of my mind everytime I read that ) start to cross all boundaries, from simple to complex and no description I could provide would do justice.

But when you look at your template, drop in a few MODx tags for content, chunks, and TVs, you are still left very much with a full web page from head to... well, body, but it doesn’t get all chopped up, pulled, and stretched trying to skin it over the CMS. From a designer standpoint, this is perhaps the ultimate freedom and makes it easier to transition into than probably most CMS’s. In many ways, if you design primarily from a CSS standpoint versus and XHTML standpoint, you very well might be able to go from Photoshop or Fireworks to MODx, bypassing DW or other editor of choice.

Perhaps the biggest challenge is that once you start to get into MODx you’ll find that your brain starts to run faster with ideas on what to do, what you can do, and how to do it than either your learning curve absorption rate or the development as many of the snippets and MODx is still in the early stages.... though your own limitations will probably keep you busy for awhile before the other issue kicks in.

Luckily, I think the development team is working really hard to keep pushing any limitations of MODx and the snippets further and further out.

Can you create a module that will design my site, I just enter what style colour and some buzz keywords and it does the rest, can it auto bill my client also.

--just kiddin