Quote from: blitz at Jun 27, 2007, 09:56 AM
Okay --- I appreciate your response but I’m not really sure where that leaves me. I guess you did say you would "leave the technical details to those more capable of explaining the whys and hows."
Can anyone else just simply say "yes" or "no" to whether I can develop custom apps as the one I described using ModX or if it’s possible to just integrate homegrown ones? I’m not looking for an extensive howto guide. Thanks
I’ve played with this a little bit when adapting Scform, (an open source, third-party contact form that hides email addresses from prying eyes) for use with MODx. I initially just installed the thing and put a link to it in one of the pages in the MODx site. That worked ok but, of course, the contact page didn’t look like the rest of the site. Then I made the pages that show up to users into snippets and put calls to those snippets into new documents on the MODx site. That actually went pretty quickly and looked great. I’m using it now and it works great but it doesn’t really do things the MODx way (more about that in a minute).
Actually, part of the problem is that MODx is so flexible that I could think of a number of different ways to do what I wanted and had a hard time deciding which was best in the long run. The hard part is that doing things the MODx way supposes that you can set parameters (i.e. options) in the snippet call. This is harder to do since the program you’re integrating won’t be set up that way. It will probably have a "config" file somewhere that contains the variables. Converting it to a standard snippet in MODx is fairly trivial PHP programming IF the contents of the config file only need to be read once. In the program I’m working on, several different pages read the config file. Still doable but, once again, about 5 different ways to do it and not so trivial programming. I still haven’t decided how I want to do it.
(If anyone wants to chime in on this, I’d be grateful -- I’m mainly thinking of either storing the snippet parameter values in the DB using the DB-API or making an array out of them and storing it in a SESSION variable).
I will testify that it’s definitely worth using MODx, even if you have to put some effort into adding features to it. Stuff that used to be a page of code (or many pages) is often a single snippet call in MODx. After a relatively short period of adjusting to how MODx works (and bumping into a few quirks like using back-ticks instead of quotes and not leaving spaces around equals signs in snippet calls) I was able to create a full-fledged web site and set up several sub-admins each with their own access areas and capabilities. It was fairly easy for me and unbelievably easy for them. I’m continually amazed by how simple it is to implement changes my users ask for. Someone will ask, "Can you set it up so I can edit the content of the news page?" I log on to the manager and, a couple of clicks later, it’s done.
I’d also recommend learning some PHP, though, as you will very likely want to create your own snippets or modify someone else’s somewhere down the line.
Bob
MODX Staff
☆ A M B ☆
