Hello,
At the moment, i have at hands two small projects that need a simple CMS solution, and i came across MODx. It seems like a really good application, well thought out and with a very nice interface, and less intimidating than Joomla and alikes (for both devel and editors). So, i’d like to give it a try, and possibly start using it for other similar projects.
However, i’m still not sure if it fits the purpose. I have the need to incorporate a couple of "backoffice" (more than CMS) features. This means, in this particular case, the ability to integrate with a couple of custom data tables in a database. So, i would need to have custom forms for specific data types, that automatically produce new output on the website. Let’s imagine a shopping web site, where you would need to allow an editor to manage the store products via MODx, instead of creating a new document, you’d create/edit/delete a product.
Is this possible with MODx? If so, what would be the best approach to this? Or is just too much for now and i should wait for future release? (i ask this one because i read a thread about ORM plans a while ago in here).
Any thoughts on this?
Thanks,
r
This is a common use of MODx actually. Lots of existing snippets create and manage their own database tables via custom forms and/or manager modules (e.g., MaxiGallery, Jot, ShopX). I don’t know of anything that you can do on your own in PHP that you can’t integrate easily into MODx.
But it allows to map form fields to sql table or some kind of similar interaction, or one has to code completely a plugin and the form interface?
Maybe i’m thinking more in the likes of ORM functionality..
[edit]
I now see that this could be possible by creating a module. However, the datatypes supported are too basic. No dates and no booleans, that is a crime!
Seems to me that MODx + a minimally decent ORM would constitute a killer CMS.
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At the moment one has to deal with this the "old-fashioned" way; I’ve got a tutorial on doing just that (with a bit of AJAX thrown in for good measure) with a module on my site (
http://www.sottwell.com/database-module.html).
However, that site is actually running on the 0.9.7 alpha development version. This uses as its core the most remarkable
xPDO libraries, which are just full ORB, OR/M, PDO, and other CRUD. Maybe someday I’ll even be able to make enough sense of it to do something with it! Sort of like a reasonably competent bicycle repair person trying to figure out a Rolls-Royce.
