Is ModX for me? (questions inside)

Hi everyone
currently I am creating a few websites for clients and am looking for a CMS system that is easy to install, setup and mod (for me) and easy to use (for the clients)

In the past I had used psuedo CMS’ such as NucleusCMS but had grown somewhat tired of its limitations in setting up multiple pages and the mess it created when I tried to run multiple sites each with multiple static pages from one single install.

What I wanted to know is if ModX is for me.
Here are a few questions.

1) Let us say i made a site design in photoshop and wish to make a template out of it. How easy is it to do that and are there any tutorials for taking the image and applying it to modx.

2) With only one installation of modx would i be able to manage several sites at once? For example let us say I have a single central site and 5 other satellite sites setup. Can i perform that with ModX and have seperate news posting pages for each site and have them all interlinked:
a] everytime an article is posted on the satellite sites it will be auto-reposted on the central site?
b] that i can easily setup easy referencing thru the network of sites and have a search feature on one site show organized listings on the other sites?

3) Being able to setup secondary pages? In Nucleus I found it quite off putting being that I managed several sites off of one single install and with each site having somewhere around 100 secondary pages each (ranging from info to spreadsheets and so forth). How easy is it to make this kind of setup in ModX and how automated is it? Before I found it quite time consuming to have to upload extra files everytime i wanted to put up an additional info page or whatever.

4) Different access levels. Can they be created on the fly with different capabilities for each level as opposed to a strict pre-made levels?

5) Do I have to display the ModX copyright at the bottom of my page?

thank you for your time.

Quote from: malach at Dec 13, 2006, 11:50 AM

Hi everyone currently I am creating a few websites for clients and am looking for a CMS system that is easy to install, setup and mod (for me) and easy to use (for the clients). In the past I had used psuedo CMS’ such as NucleusCMS but had grown somewhat tired of its limitations in setting up multiple pages and the mess it created when I tried to run multiple sites each with multiple static pages from one single install.

Hi

Well, I don’t know about the "easy" part since it’s really subjective and is dependent upon your skills and experience. Let’s say with a decent knowledge of XHTML / CSS and a bit of PHP you should be fine for the most part. As usual, going further into customizing will require a bit more PHP knowledge, though less than for other CMS (check out Template Variables and you’ll see you don’t need to be a PHP whiz to add custom content types and variables to your pages).

You quote Nucleus, which is nice but a Blog oriented application while MODx goes definitely way further, an advanced CMS (or a CMF if you will, F stands for Framework of course) with an API and dbAPI .

I think given your requirements you’ve found a tool that seem to fit your needs

Quote from: malach

What I wanted to know is if ModX is for me.
Here are a few questions.

1) Let us say i made a site design in photoshop and wish to make a template out of it. How easy is it to do that and are there any tutorials for taking the image and applying it to modx.

Really if you’re looking for a CMS with a fast mockup to template time, MODx is the system for you

It’s really a dream come true for designers, since it naturally integrates well in the (X)HTML / CSS integration process : a quick look at the documentation and the wiki will help understand MODx easy and natural tag based system. There is no added layer of complexity here such as smarty or phpTemplate with their not-so-fluid header - main - footer include system. Your template is plain good old (X)HTML spiced up with dynamically generated / human readable tags. Tags can be used to call any document variables (like your page content with [*content*] : want to make it editable from the frontend ? just add a # like this : [*#content*] , your page title with [*title*], your path with [*site_url*] and so on... )

Let’s say MODx is among the top systems for a fast mockup to template time... I estimate the gain between MODx and Joomla is about 20% faster, and I am being conservative here

Quote from: malach

2) With only one installation of modx would i be able to manage several sites at once? For example let us say I have a single central site and 5 other satellite sites setup. Can i perform that with ModX and have seperate news posting pages for each site and have them all interlinked:
a] everytime an article is posted on the satellite sites it will be auto-reposted on the central site?
b] that i can easily setup easy referencing thru the network of sites and have a search feature on one site show organized listings on the other sites?

I am not the best person to answer that, hopefully someone from the dev team will jump in and add some details.

But the short answer is : multisite is not yet shipping with MODx, though there is a hack but it’s old and was meant for 0.9.2

MODx will be multi-site in the future with the new architecture (I’ll let Jason elaborate on "contexts").

Quote from: malach

3) Being able to setup secondary pages? In Nucleus I found it quite off putting being that I managed several sites off of one single install and with each site having somewhere around 100 secondary pages each (ranging from info to spreadsheets and so forth). How easy is it to make this kind of setup in ModX and how automated is it? Before I found it quite time consuming to have to upload extra files everytime i wanted to put up an additional info page or whatever.

I am not sure I understand what you mean by "secondary" pages... ?

Quote from: malach

4) Different access levels. Can they be created on the fly with different capabilities for each level as opposed to a strict pre-made levels?

It really depends on what you need there. I am not sure what you mean exactly : MODx handle separately frontend and backend access, and has both web users list and manager users list. It also has a system which allow to create "document groups" and then assign web users and/or manager users to them.

I’d say MODx has decent flexibility. You can create roles, and you have a pretty granular control over rights.
But the permission system is not perfect, some minor inconsistencies remain and the degree of control could be better but it’s OK for most cases you’ll encounter. It will, of course, be improved with the new (totally rewritten) architecture.

Quote from: malach

5) Do I have to display the ModX copyright at the bottom of my page?

A recent post wil answer this question :
http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,9946.0.html

I am not sure I understand what you mean by "secondary" pages... ?

sorry if i wasnt clear. by secondary pages i mean the following:
primary page = blog/frontpage/news and update page

secondary pages = contact us form page, articles pages, details page on a specific item, and so forth.

Then you’ll have no problem

MODx is not built as a blog/news system with secondary pages like you can add in WordPress with Pages : web documents are hierarchically organized in a document tree, you can do whatever you like. Even more powerful, you’re not limited as to what type of document you can create (e.g you’re not limited to text/html document types...).

Quote from: davidm at Dec 13, 2006, 02:34 PM

Then you’ll have no problem

MODx is not built as a blog/news system with secondary pages like you can add in WordPress with Pages : web documents are hierarchically organized in a document tree, you can do whatever you like. Even more powerful, you’re not limited as to what type of document you can create (e.g you’re not limited to text/html document types...).

That will save my untold amounts of time. I used to run a number of game related sites and putting up individual information pages for different aspects of each game left me with several hundred blog entries and a lot of secondary file uploading and also meant that I was the only one with access to do so thus other staffers had to submit to me directly to get pages setup.

Then that brings me to my last question for now. Is there a central database of somekind for plugins/mods/hacks of modX? I noticed the wikki page but i was wondering if there were any other locations.

For example this forum looks rather nice. How easy is it to integrate a forum script into modX and am I limited to certain scripts? With nucleus there was no mod/plugin at the time for me to integrate my vbulletin board into it and so i had to have seperate user lists and signups for both the forum and the site.

This forum is just skinned to look like the MODx site; it’s not integrated per se. For available resources, see: http://modxcms.com/resources.html