Rethinking MODx

You could use a TV with @DOCUMENT binding.

The biggest issue I’ve seen with printer friendly CSS is in the use of floats getting chopped if they extend beyond the page.

So the answer is.... don’t use them, you have to make things static. Not saying this is the only issue, but it is the only one that I’ve really come across. But a printer friendly page doesn’t need to be the same page minus navigation... most of mine don’t look like their web counterparts at all, their whole focus is just to deliver the content as cleanly and with as little paper as possible.

Otherwise, perhaps you could create one general printer friendly template page to send all of your pages too, then use the link and pass along the content section of the page, or perhaps a way to use the viewport widget... but you may have to write this up yourself or perhaps some of the coders here can give you a jumpstart.

Quote from: identity at Nov 12, 2006, 10:24 AM

The biggest issue I’ve seen with printer friendly CSS is in the use of floats getting chopped if they extend beyond the page.

Isn’t that simply solved with the right CSS? Clearing all floats should do the job as far as I know. I do agree that printerfriendly pages do not have to look/feel the same as their digital counterparts, but I’d personally stick to the easiest option, which is making my current style printer friendly, but indeed, that could be done without floating.

Well, there’s the easy option, and then there’s the best option. I might have a 3-page article in MODx that I wish to print as one page in MODx; also "this page was printed from xyz.com".

I don’t recall which browser/engine it was in particular, I haven’t done any real recently, but it might have been FF/mozilla....

say you had a two-column layout with the right column floated that extended 1.5 pages and your entire document would print on two pages. You would get the entire left side, but the right side would probably be fine on the first page, but you wouldn’t have any of it on the second page.

This also holds true for images that are floated, if they overlap to the next page, the "bottom" half wouldn’t print.

But some of this can be handled strategically depending on the layout... if you know you have a main photo or some text at the very beginning of the page that floats and would never extend to the next page, you can probably, still safely let it float. In most cases you’ll just need to present the information in some order, rather than "simultaneaously" in a side-by-side fashion.

The vast majority of the time, someone printing a document is most concerned about the information, not the presentation... they just want to know that 1/2 inch of the right side doesn’t get cut off the page... which 99% of the time means that some critical piece of information you wanted isn’t there

Unfortunately, there is still limited support... setting pagebreaks, etc., but no more limited than using a standalone page.

Quote from: Neutrogeno at Nov 02, 2006, 10:34 AM

Hi,
these days I’m evaluating the MODx CMS in deep for a forthcoming web project. No doubt it’s a great app but, in my opinion, you should rethink some important choices. Here are some guidelines you could follow:

1. Less is more. MODx admin interface should be more clean and organized. Moreover the project website should eliminate any hype or buzzword and focuse on documentation and support. An updated list of MODx powered web sites should be added. Don’t forget that the best promotion for a web app is made by its happy users on their blogs.

2. The whole hyerarchy thing is simply old school. Instead you should introduce the concept of "section" and eventually "subsection". Each post should belong to a section (or sub-section). Home page should be a section apart. Friendly URLs should be mapped on the schema section/(subsection)/articletitle. So you could eliminate the archaic and ambiguous folder/file tree at left in the admin panel.

3. Each section should be associated with 2 templates: the first for the section home page, the second for the single entries. Of course two different sections could even share the same templates. Moreover, when posting an article, the user could choice a different template for that particular entry.

4. Template Variables should be tied to one or more sections not to templates. TV are related to data structure not presentation.

5. You should eliminate any embedded visitors logging. It suck!

6. You should eliminate frames (and the ugly file tree at left) in the admin interface.

I hope my suggestion can inspire the excellent dev team. MODx is not yet ready for my forthcoming project but I hope 2007 can be his year.

Neutrogeno

it seems you come from a mambo/joomla background? Personally i really dislike the section/subsection approach, and love the flexibility the hierarchy with parents and childs give me. This is one of the main reasons we moved away from mambo/joomla

Olaf

I find it amazing that some people are suggesting modx is hard for new users to learn. put [*#content*] in your xhtml design and you are away - no hacking, no compromise of design, perfect. This is the first CMS I have used extensively and I have found the learning curve for the more advanced features very smooth.

Documentation can be hard to find, but the support forum is second to none and you are never left stranded.

g.

Its all about how much time you invest, I had 2 weeks dedicated to getting it to work and trawling thu the posts and waiting for you great people to answer my questions. I was lucky that I had 2 weeks at home, if I was at work people would be pestering me all the time and I would never get anything done.

So my advice is jump right in feet first then once you get stuck (will be quite quick) read the docs from scratch then read them again, and visit the wiki for each module. Just keep looking and you will find it somewhere on the site.

Then ask for help in the forum.

My site is finished in the fact that I have everything setup, and running, all I need to do now is populate it will all my loverly content - will prob take another week.

After its populated I will never have to re-enter the same content again, if I want to change my design(I`ve had to with my traditional design 3 times thats 3 weeks work!)

No more tedium of copy and paste, Yeeeeeeee Haaaaaaaaa

Kick on!

:: ONE BIG CRITICS ONLY ::

Please add much more semantic. I mean that stuff w3c recommends and plans to embed in web3.0 in the next 10 years
like Tim Berners-Lee said. Semantic "should" (that word doesn’t sound nice lets call it "would be nice to") be generated automatically where possible.
PLEASE look at http://www.altova.com


3 words

I
like
MODx


People want something to be perfect, but nothing is perfect except nature in my opinion.

Quote from: Xsss4hell at Dec 01, 2006, 05:49 PM

:: ONE BIG CRITICS ONLY ::

Please add much more semantic. I mean that stuff w3c recommends and plans to embed in web3.0 in the next 10 years
like Tim Berners-Lee said. Semantic "should" (that word doesn’t sound nice lets call it "would be nice to") be generated automatically where possible.
PLEASE look at http://www.altova.com

People want something to be perfect, but nothing is perfect except nature in my opinion.

Hm, why bother about Web 3.0 when 4.0Alpha is just around the corner? But seriously, I don’t like those buzzwords, perhaps you can be more exact about your ’stuff that w3c recommends and plans to embed in the next 10 years’, because I certainly couldn’t find it.

The nature perfect? I’m afraid not, my friend