Decision help needed for bigger project

Hello,

after three successful client projects with MODx I’m about to decide for MODx (or Typo3) on a travel agency site with six sister destination sites. It would help me and hopefully save a lot of time if you can help me answer three questions on MODx in this case:

• The customer needs to be able to resize images (to different / individual sizes) before upload or at least after upload in the editor, and this should be done in a kb-saving and quality way (I use imageMagick for some other projects which works fine). The image editing does not work with TinyMCE, and is limited in FCKEditor. Maybe I’ve overseen some real important things or plugins?
• I need to integrate a newsletter function: The client should be able to manage users and subscriptions from within MODx and also send newsletter based on templates defined in MODx. There’s already a base of about 5000 addresses to import (via Excel i.e.). This is not a killer feature as it can be done with external tools also, but would be nice to have.
• There’s a travel configuration for site visitors to be built in. Probably of kind of basket to collect travel elements, session-based (no online purchase/payment at this moment). So is there already function like an ecommerce basket in development? I’ve done a search in the repository but didn’t find one.

So if anybody has hints in these issues many thanks in advance ... (and sorry if my English isn’t quite perfect...)

No thoughts on these topics? Am I totally wrong in something?

Thanks again

I think a lot of people are on vacation at the moment; nothing personal. I’ll try and start the conversation and see what happens...

Quote from: hgw at Jun 26, 2007, 04:07 AM

• The customer needs to be able to resize images (to different / individual sizes) before upload or at least after upload in the editor, and this should be done in a kb-saving and quality way (I use imageMagick for some other projects which works fine). The image editing does not work with TinyMCE, and is limited in FCKEditor. Maybe I’ve overseen some real important things or plugins?

There are many potential solutions to this, but it really depends on the technical issues and work flow your customer is using. Do a search (using the Google Search of site:modxcms.com provided above) on phpthumb for some interesting solutions on controlling image sizes, or perhaps you could integrate another image editing solution that already meets your customers needs.

Quote from: hgw at Jun 26, 2007, 04:07 AM

• I need to integrate a newsletter function: The client should be able to manage users and subscriptions from within MODx and also send newsletter based on templates defined in MODx. There’s already a base of about 5000 addresses to import (via Excel i.e.). This is not a killer feature as it can be done with external tools also, but would be nice to have.

I’m a fan of outsourcing bulk email functionality myself. The risks of being blacklisted (and subsequently violate your hosting agreement) from sending bulk email from your own server are numerous, and services like http://www.zookoda.com/ make it easy to take your templates and send one-time newsletters, or recurring newsletters with content dynamically pulled from RSS feeds on your site.

Quote from: hgw at Jun 26, 2007, 04:07 AM

• There’s a travel configuration for site visitors to be built in. Probably of kind of basket to collect travel elements, session-based (no online purchase/payment at this moment). So is there already function like an ecommerce basket in development? I’ve done a search in the repository but didn’t find one.

MODxCart and ShopX are the only attempts I know of so far. You’ll likely need to invest some development resources into this part, but it is quite easy to create a session-based cart in PHP, especially if you don’t involve payment processing.