I’m evaluating ModX to use for our university site. I’m impressed with the functionality, as well as seeing two other schools using it with similar scale. I’ve been reading the documentation and searching thru the forums and have one other question regarding the system before we start a full-scale implementation.
I understand how to move the install from development to a live server. My question is this: If we implement ModX, we’ll be moving individual departments first and then the overall site at a later time. (Lots of tag soup code to fix to XHTML/CSS) Is it possible to install the system in the main root directory without overwriting the current index page? Essentially we will be working from the bottom up instead of the top down. I figure that I can create staging containers for sites in development and then rename them when I’m ready to overwrite the current department sites. My concern is that I don’t blow up the current site with the install.
Cheers,
Amberly
Yes; if you use friendly URLs this is easy - just rename index.php to modx.php and amend the .htaccess accordingly. The htaccess will only show a MODx page if there isn’t already a file there with the same name, so changing the aliases when you’ve deleted an old page will work great. (If you’re doing all the pages at the same time, it’s often easier to just use a prefix like "new" in the Friendly URL settings and then change it back to "" when you’re ready.)
Great! Now I’ve got a different question that I think I know the answer to, but am not completely sure.
Say I have a master catalog of courses that is kept and updated by one department. Each site page would correspond to a page in the catalog and have an individual id. Now say I have a school that wants to pull a page of information from that master catalog and display it on their own site. In order to do this, I would need to use the @Document binding, create a template variable that pulls the document id and the corresponding content section, and put it in a template. Correct?
Ideally what we would like to do is somehow share certain blocks of content between department sites. Then we could have one "keeper of the content" and allow other departments to pull it into their own site.
If something like this is possible, I will be tremendously overjoyed.
