Basically, I need help moving to ModX from a hand-rolled CMS

I am trying to move from a hand-rolled CMS I did for our college’s athletic department to ModX. I have gotten the basic template installed; however, I’m kind of lost after that.
Here is a link to the current site: http://sports.tusculum.edu
Here is a link to the Modx template:http://sports.tusculum.edu/modx/index.php?id=47

Here are my immediate problems.
1. I cannot figure out how to recreate the left menu.
2. I cannot figure out how to create the "homepages" for the various sports, so that links for all the baseball stories show on one page, softball on another, etc.
3. I cannot figure out how to create the overall homepage so that all the sports articles are shown in descending order on the main page.
4. Finally, I have no idea how to recreate the roster and schedules for each sport dynamically.

I would GREATLY appreciate any help here. I’ve gone through the documentation a few times and just am stuck.

Hi there....

Been a while since I posted!

1) Menus are done using snippets. A snippet is a piece of php code that basically takes a few params and returns a value. The snippet you need to use is the [! Dropmenu !] snippet. You will fine plenty of info on using dropmenu and any other snippet on these forums.

2 + 3) you homepage seems to be an article from everyother section. For this look into the Newslisting snippet. You just want to pull in the top article from each section, this would re-create your homepage.

4) For doing your roster you might want to look into making your own snippet. Modx is just php at the end of the day

Hope this helps....it should at least get you started....

Instead of NewsListing, which has been deprecated, you should use Ditto 2 (http://www.modxcms.com/ditto)
DropMenu has been deprecated as well. Wayfinder 1 or 2 is its replacement.

For the roster you can actually use Ditto as I have on a site I manage http://www.ecrbaseball.com. You just create a template that is a row of the table with TV’s for all the special values like weight, height, etc. and then put the <table> and </table> tags outside of the call. Then each player is a document in that folder with all the TV’s filled out.

Definitely use Wayfinder 2 and Ditto 2.