Is MODx suit for me?

Hi, MODx guys,

I think you will reply my question "YES", but I need your more
experienced advice.

I only have glance on MODx, seems it’s OK, but I am still curious
whether it’s suit for me. See below.

I’m going to start a personal website to share my ideas, source code
and software.
I know very few on PHP or MySQL, and have no interesting to learn them.
So I would never like to hack any PHP code.

So my requirements are,
1, The CMS should be simple, easy to use.
It shouldn’t force me to learn it for long time, and it shouldn’t
hog the server resource.
I use a virtual share host, so if any scripts use too much resource,
I will be under the risk to be kicked out.

2, I don’t need a complicate website. Some simple pages are enough.

3, A blog. Seems Word Press is the most popular, but the ’embedded’
blog in Modx is really attractive because I have limited MySQL
databases. If I use the embedded one, I can save one database.

But, is the embedded blog as almost strong as WP? The points I
really care,
A, Is it easy to anti-spam? I don’t want to moderate the blog comments,
so maybe there should be some mechanism to anti-spam, such like
image text verify.
B, Is it easy to provide RSS seed? permanent link?

4, Easily integrate with Google Adsence so I can make some money
from the site.

5, Both blog and CMS software should be SEO friendly. Again, make
me earn some money from popularity by optimizing the SEO.

It may be possible to do the things you want without learning MySQL and PHP, but MODx really is geared towards PHP/MySQL developers, and to get the most out of it you will need to learn them.

So why not learn PHP and MySQL? They are easy to learn if you have any programming experience, and it will give you some new skills. Combined with MODx you will find that the possibilities are endless for creating custom websites.

Andy

I think there are more suitable CMS for your purposes than MODx - certainly MODx can do all the things you mentioned, but for your purposes I would look at Wordpress or Serendipity, both of which provide blogs + static pages which seems to be what you are looking for.

To answer in more detail:

MySQL - you do not need to know any at all for setup or for daily use and you could happily not ever need any.
PHP - you do not need to know any, but it helps to be able to use it for modifying/debugging/creating snippets.

More importantly though

HTML/CSS - you WILL need to know this to create/modify your initial look/feel/navigation

I think the crucial point here is that MODx is NOT a CMS where you can simply click a button to have your entire "template" change to a new look.

Your question about "number of databases" is irrelevant as I think that all blog/CMS (that I have looked at) have the facility to name all their tables with a unique prefix (such at modx_, wp_, s9y_) so that they can share a single database with another system.

HTH

Gordon

Thank you all.

I know some HTML and CSS.

The reason I don’t want to learn PHP and MySQL:
I have too much other things to do or learn.

You can always partner up with someone that has coding experience to divide the amount of work on your project.