Maybe I'm missing something obvious...

Hi everybody,

Please forgive me if this comes out a bit snarky. It's not meant to be - I'm just frustrated.

I'm very new to ModX Evo and I'm working my way through the documentation and the getting started material. But I'm finding that the material keeps referring to things that just don't seem to exist.

A couple of examples:

Go to this URL: http://modx.com/evolution/developer/getting-started/ and scroll down to the "Learn by Doing: Build your first site" section. Have a look at the code that you're supposed to copy. Then read "Step 2. Create a page" where you need to create some HTML code which will be "inserted into your template where the [[*content*]] tag is"

What [[*content*]] tag? There's no tag even close to that in the code. Unsurprisingly I've been unable to get this to work.

As a second note from that same section, Step 2 says "From the Resources tab of the manager's left-hand pane, either create a New Document". Again, what Resources tab? And I've been unable to find anywhere in the interface that references creating a Document. Unless Document is an unstated synonym for Resource? If so, that's a stunningly effective way to confuse someone trying to learn.

And as a third problem with that section, I found the invisible toolbar off to the right that allows me to view the code quite by accident when I moused over it and noticed my pointer change. It literally doesn't show up. I thought that this might be a browser issue (I'm using Chrome) but it's the same in Firefox too.

Here's another example. Go to this URL: http://rtfm.modx.com/display/Evo1/Terminology and scroll down to the last paragraph - "This is how it all fits together:" Note the following:

"the Content Area, identified in pink"
"menu Snippets, identified in blue"
"Template Variables .... These are identified in green"
"Chunks identified in red"

Just where is the example that all of these are referring to? It would really help to understand how it all works, but there's nothing on that page that it could possibly be. I even went to the old documentation to see if something hadn't been moved over but there's nothing there either.

Please tell me what I'm missing?

You are not missing anything. The documentation is not good.

1. "where the tag is" means wherever in the template or the content you place the tag. Also, the tag is not correct; for Evo it needs to be [*content*].

2. The author meant "Resource Tree", this being the tree structure reflecting the parent/child relationships of the resources, as well as indication of which ones are published and show in a menu. Right-click on a selected resource to get a context menu for that resource. "Document" is the deprecated term for "resource". Page, document and resource can be loosely considered synonymous, although the final served page is not necessarily generated using a MODx resource. The terminology was changed to more closely conform to standard Web object description; a "resource" is anything requested via an HTTP URL (Universal Resource Locator), and in the vast majority of cases such a request will in fact be resolved through processing a MODx resource.

3. What invisible toolbar off to the right?

4. Apparently an image is missing; it would be for a template with the described tags highlighted as mentioned.

Try this http://sottwell.com/modx-from-the-inside.html

Thanks, it's not just me then

The problem with the content tag is that it simply isn't there - it's completely missing from the code provided. And there's no indication where, or even that, you have to put it in.

There's a toolbar of to the right of each code section, about level with the first line of code. Mouse around that area and you'll find it. It allows you to view the code so that you can copy it without all of the line numbers, as well as print it out. (See the attached screen shot)

Ah, you were referring to the documentation. I know about the HTML view in the rich text editor in the Manger, but I was rather alarmed at the thought there was something else in the Manager I didn't know about!

Some of the documentation examples are very odd because the author forgot that the MODx site uses MODx, and used MODx tags in his demo code - which, of course, MODx processed as it would any MODx tag in its content, so you end up with the parsed results of the tags, and not the tags themselves!

I found the original source of the rtfm documentation here http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/Printable_ModX_documentation_book_in_A5_format and cut the image that is missing from the documentation.

[ed. note: sottwell last edited this post 15 years ago.]