I am a photographer by trade. I enjoyed a 20 year career doing photojournalism while also maintaining a side business doing commercial work. I now work for myself. The internet and photography have merged a lot over the years and I now do some custom web design. I mainly did static sites before finding MODx.
While moving on from static sites I must have tried about ten or so content management systems. In the end I focused on MODx and Wordpress. I know how to work with images and graphics. I also know xhtml and CSS quite well. Programming languages have been hard for me to pick up though.
When comparing MODx, Wordpress and other systems you read all kinds of debate on ease of use, power, flexibility, plug-and-play, customization, templates, etc, etc. I come from the visual word rather than the programming world. I want power, flexibility and options. I also want results. I want a system that I can deploy and then manage my content. Facing a huge learning curve, required investigation, forum searching, complicated road maps, etc, is not managing one's content! Although some aspects of the MODx arena were frustrating I stuck with it: I became adept at building my own design layouts and making them work with MODx Evolution.
I then tired Revolution and found that there was a lot to like. I struggled with image management though and never really connected with the concepts and presentation of Gallery and Galleriffic. I still preferred MaxiGallery in Evo, although I had a hard time managing the thumbnails. I could never get PHP scripts that manage thumbnails to work well.
I then gave Revolution a new try and still did not connect with Gallery and its presentation. I had success with using a custom jQuery script with Maxigallery and decided to try this approach with Revolution and Gallery. I then had some signs of success. I began using Revolution, Gallery, Colorbox and a jQuery asynchronous image loader. This method also required the use of the If snippet. I really like this system. It does a nice job of presenting albums, titles, descriptions and thumbnails. There is a lot of CSS that one can edit as well. One of the issues I then had was being able to present descriptive paragraphs to the albums on a landing page. I messed around with this and decided that using a custom template using getResources would do the trick here. This gives me the flexibility to use the automatic features of the Gallery system or the extra flexibility of getResources aggregation, depending on the type of page I am using. I built a system of TVs for the thumbnails, alt tags and gallery IDs in my gallery pages template. So far it all works great.
I then added a contact form and the new Articles blogging suite. Thanks to Shaun the Articles system is just awesome. It took some time to make it work with my own template using the CSS I wanted, but I now have it working. There is still much work to do.
I am also using jQuery for both of my menu systems, one of which uses a cool looking navigation sprite image I made.
I have a lot more editing to do. I also need to add a lot more images and other content. I plan on writing more articles about photography, DSLR filmmaking, web design and MODx. I am also one of the main contributors and moderators over at www.cinema5d.com.
Although I was resistant to Revolution at first I am a total convert now. I have deployed two Revo sites in the last six weeks. The journey and learning continues. Bob Ray's new Revolution book now sits on my desk, next to my keyboard. Thank you Bob!
You can see my latest Revolution site (my own main business site) here:
http://www.balmainphotography.com/
Cheers!
Max
[ed. note: Photowebmax last edited this post 14 years, 8 months ago.]
