Hey MODx-ers, I’m sorta new to MODx and I decided to sign up for a forum account today because even though I’ve perused the forum a lot I never thought to sign up! First I wanted to say thanks to all the people who have made MODx what it is - I’ve never seen such a dedicated and hard working team that is also helpful and friendly to their users.
MODx itself is amazing... all the stuff you can do with it is just... I can’t think of a word for it but it’s amazing.
I’ve tried a bajillion other CMSes... from Dragonfly to Xoops, and I haven’t been satisfied with any of them. Some were way too difficult to use, nevermind installing them (don’t even get me started on Typo3!), and I could never expect my other site staff to ever be able to use them. Things like Joomla seemed like they might work, but the entire templating system is difficult to use, it’s very difficult to integrate custom scripts with, and the admin interface is confusing even for web-savvy people.
Basically, I own a website that gets a decent amount of traffic (several thousand pageviews per day), and it’s hell trying to update the layout. Actually, it’s been the same for about 3 years, and a lot of people from my forum think it deserves a redesign. It’s just a plain old HTML site with some includes and a couple custom scripts, and changing the layout would mean many many hours of copy-and-pasting, recoding, cleaning up, and the possibility of things being broken later on. I needed to find a system that made it easy to manage content (because honestly, having a few people trying to edit one site using Dreamweaver or something sucks), integrate my scripts, and template -- while being user friendly for people who aren’t exactly web genius people. I was looking for such a system for about 2 months... I was about to just give up and say to hell with it.
On a whim, I searched Google for something... I honestly can’t remember (I think it had something to do with SEO) and pulled up the MODx page. I instantly fell in love with the project and realized it’s exactly what I needed.
For a number of reasons, I KNOW MODx is for me:
- Templating is a breeze. I easily duplicated my current table design without any problem. I figured I would try that out first before working on a new design. The tags are easy to use and it lets me do just about whatever I want.
- Script integration is pretty easy too. If you write clean code, it should be a snap to convert it to be MODx-friendly.
- It’s fast, lightweight and stable. Usually I’m able to break things quite easily... I couldn’t with MODx.
- Import function: I haven’t tried this yet, but I read a few posts on importing an HTML site and I know it’ll make moving my site over a lot easier. Without this, I’d be forced to move over several hundred pages... eek!
- User permission system: it seems so simple and easy to use! I have a basic login script on my current site right now, but it’s not really integrated with anything (I have one system for my poll, one for my gallery, another for a couple of my custom db apps). I like how you can make web users and give them access to specific parts of the site easily. Even with the manager, you an give certain users more restricted access than others. I love it!
- Snippets/modules: I very much like the fact that you don’t need to touch a single line of core code to add things to MODx... very clean, and easy on the upgrades. The number of available addons is AWESOME, and all I need to do is copy over the data from my current scripts (like my gallery script) to the snippet/module itself.
I haven’t switched my site to use MODx yet (too busy, but I’m getting started on that now), but I’ve been playing around with it, seeing what it can do, and I’m working on getting all of my scripts integrated before I actually get everything moved over. But I’m sure that MODx is for me, and I’m looking forward to asking questions here and getting my site to use MODx!
