Need Some Advice Re: Using ModX for Blog

I have just recently discovered ModX (although I seem to recall playing around with it - or something very similar - in it’s early stages some time ago) and am very impressed, albeit abit frustrated that I didn’t come across this amazing framework sometime ago. I actually have some thoughts and experiences I would like to share outlining why I feel ModXCMS is the best CMS/Blog/Framework available today, and probably the only one that will survive into the future; but that’s another post.

Now, let me start off by saying that I’m fully aware of what ModXCMS is and isn’t. I understand that ModXCMS isn’t a blogging applications, or even a CMS, it’s a framework. That said, I am VERY tempted to setup a personal blog using ModXCMS. I like the idea that a blog made with ModXCMS would be fully extendable. I could setup my blog the way I want to, without any limitations.

However, since other applications are more suited for blogs, like WordPress, I am wondering if I would be better off sticking with one of them and saving ModXCMS for more advanced purposes. I guess my main concern or question here is rather or not my blog would offer the same marketability with ModXCMS as opposed to WordPress. WordPress has the ability to Ping other sites and services when new posts are made, there is also a large community that provides for different blogs to swap trackbacks, etc.

Does anyone have any advice the could share with me. Has anyone here switched from WordPress to ModXCMS? Any comments would be appreciated.

Sean

Quote from: savetheorcas at Dec 22, 2006, 04:58 AM

However, since other applications are more suited for blogs, like WordPress, I am wondering if I would be better off sticking with one of them and saving ModXCMS for more advanced purposes. I guess my main concern or question here is rather or not my blog would offer the same marketability with ModXCMS as opposed to WordPress. WordPress has the ability to Ping other sites and services when new posts are made, there is also a large community that provides for different blogs to swap trackbacks, etc.

Does anyone have any advice the could share with me. Has anyone here switched from WordPress to ModXCMS? Any comments would be appreciated.

Sean

There are still cases where I choose one or the other, and the MODx blog will likely take more maintenance and development work here and there, but there are ways to ping sites and services when you publish content. I’m not sure anyone has tackled trackbacks yet directly from MODx, but as far as pinging blog services, you can easily publish your RSS through FeedBurner and have it ping those services for you. This is what I use, and it’s been quite effective, with the limited amount of blogging I do; more serious bloggers perhaps need all those WordPress features though, so, it’s really just a matter of weighing the value of flexibility against what you’d need to do yourself or could find another way to accomplish.

I have done several blog sites using MODx
My personal site [ http://scottydelicious.com ] as well as this site [ http://sometwittery.com ].
These are both using Ditto 1.1 beta 2 for blogging.

-sD-
Dr. Scotty Delicious, Scientist.

Thanks for the replies, they pretty much sum up what I had already assumed. My main concern with this is that I don’t want to get locked into something, such as WordPress, that would make it difficult for me to change to another platform.

It seems to me that "anything" is possible withModXCMS, it’s just a matter of writing customized code and extending the core. I assume one could make the same argument for WordPress, though ModXCMS is more of a framework and thus would seem more extendable. If I’m reading the replies correctly, trackbacks are not implemented with ModXCMS, but they are possible - correct? I mean, there is nothing in the "core" of the script that would make it difficult to write a trackpack plugin is there?

Thanks again,
Sean

I’m quite sure it would be possible to modify MODx to send out a ping to various websites when a new article has been posted, I’ve tried getting it working a while ago myself, but there didn’t seem to be much interest for it. Hopefully you’ve got some knowhow of how to do this, or manage to convince someone to help with it , because it would be no doubt a nice thing to have as well.

Edit; same goes for their trackbacks, would be nice to have in MODx as well, those two things are the only ones I’m missing right now, compared to Wordpress or any other popular blogging software.

HMMM
Is there any good reason why MODx should compete with dedicated blogging-software like WP?
I do not see one. The challenge here is more one of "interoperability" I think... not of reinventing the wheel by re-doing it the "MODx way"...
BTW: I guess that there possibly ARE good reasons - and thus would be happy to have them explained..

I personally wouldn’t use a dedicated blogging platform for sites since all sites I set up use MODx anyway, and I don’t want to train customers on two applications. Most companies I’ve found don’t need "power blogging" apps, and Ditto + Jot does an amazing job of making a pretty good mid-level blog that I can make look pretty much exactly how I’d like it to look quite easily.

Quote from: silent at Dec 28, 2006, 03:43 PM

HMMM
Is there any good reason why MODx should compete with dedicated blogging-software like WP?
I do not see one. The challenge here is more one of "interoperability" I think... not of reinventing the wheel by re-doing it the "MODx way"...
BTW: I guess that there possibly ARE good reasons - and thus would be happy to have them explained..

I’m not stating that MODx should compete with WP, I just wanted to say what was on my mind concerning blogging as pinging the main spiders is basically the only thing I’ve missed so far on my website. Indeed like rthrash said, most people wont be needing advanced blogging features, but for some, (like me) who combine a blog with multiple of the fantastic features of MODx, it would be more than welcome to be able to use MODx as a worthy ’second choice’, simply because WP lacks ’CMS’ features where MODx in my eyes only lacks the pinging

Savetheorcas; Right now I’m using ’http://pingoat.com/’ in order to ping basically all services around, you can simply enter your websites data and hit submit the first time, times after that you can simply bookmark it and click the bookmark when you’ve updated your blog, in fact it might be an even better solution than WP, as WP only pings a couple of sites, and Pingoat pings a whole shipment of ’em.

I personally use FeedBurner to power all my feeds, and they have a ping service built-in, but this is definitely something that needs to be added to the MODx aresenal as a native add-on.