Why I shifted focus from Drupal to MODx

Quote from: nyl at Aug 30, 2009, 02:52 PM

I love Modx much more than Drupal but i can’t be agree with that : even if theming is harder than in modx, it’s of course possible to build the design you want with full control of html.

The approach is different.

With MODx you can start with the design and put whatever markup you want to.

With Most of the CMS outhere, you can start with a blank html template, but you also have to think carefully about the markup because some class or ids are required.

Before starting to design, you have to know the tools and work accordingly.
It’s time consuming, and rather limited.

With Most of the CMS outhere, you can start with a blank html template, but you also have to think carefully about the markup because some class or ids are required.

Before starting to design, you have to know the tools and work accordingly.
It’s time consuming, and rather limited.

In drupal, i don’t see wich id or class are required ? When a make a design from scrath, i don’t ask my self wich modules i’m going to use : i code the main templates (page.tpl.php and his css) and then i adjust if needed the html output of the module; but in fact that’s what you do in Modx with the chunks (wich are existing now in a certain way in drupal 6 as file.tpl.php in the modules).

The point is that it took me a looong time to understant how to do EXACTLY what i want with ALL the html of drupal. With modx it take me well...the time to understand what a chunk is .

But that’s still incorrect to say that you can’t do a nice design with drupal : in a well coded modules, html is always ouputed in a template file or a theme function and both are fully overridable.

If i choose Drupal since 8 monthes, that’s because if i spent a more time do design, i also save A LOT of time with all the modules : that’s to say that the moment i have to code php come very later with drupal than with modx !

Quote from: nyl at Aug 30, 2009, 04:13 PM

The point is that it took me a looong time to understant how to do EXACTLY what i want with ALL the html of drupal. With modx it take me well...the time to understand what a chunk is .

The last time i checked drupal, the template system was still meddling php and html (and it was a long time ago) and has mandatory markup.

But that’s still incorrect to say that you can’t do a nice design with drupal : in a well coded modules, html is always ouputed in a template file or a theme function and both are fully overridable.

That’s the concept of Drupal templating, "overriding"

I’ve seen some quite beautiful Drupal website.
That’s also the case for Joomla (which is clearly not as flexible as Drupal is)

If i choose Drupal since 8 monthes, that’s because if i spent a more time do design, i also save A LOT of time with all the modules : that’s to say that the moment i have to code php come very later with drupal than with modx !

Well, it may be because you passed ALL this time trying to understand what to do with ALL the html which is always straight forward with MODx

Joke aside, i’ve to agree somewhat about the php side which come quickly with MODx.

Firstly, don’t confuse Drupal with the theming engine, PHPTemplate. Drupal supports several templating engines, including some that are HTML/CSS only, but the latter allow you to do far less of course. Either way, Drupal is the framework behind the theming layer. Sure, PHPTemplate is now part of Drupal’s core packages, but you can swap it out for something else (if you like pain). Anyway, that’s a side point:

As a Drupal developer, I can tell you HTML and theming in Drupal 6.x is light years ahead of Drupal 5.x. So if you’re curious, and you haven’t tried Drupal for a few years, it is worth a look.

These days every module ships (or should ship - of course, there’s nothing you can do about bad module developers who leave mark-up in the module code! *waves fist*) with a set of template files representing every single piece of mark-up the module produces in order to operate. If you’re happy with the mark-up as is, leave it where it is in the module’s templates folder. If you want to change it, copy it to your theme’s templates folder and change it to your heart’s content.

In Drupal 5.x it was a mess. With PHPTemplate you had to copy theme functions from module code to a file called template.php, alter the PHP to alter the output of the template variables, etc. All that is gone now. It really is just mark-up and CSS.

Just thought I’d clarify.

Quote from: greg.harvey at Aug 31, 2009, 04:02 AM

In Drupal 5.x it was a mess. With PHPTemplate you had to copy theme functions from module code to a file called template.php, alter the PHP to alter the output of the template variables, etc. All that is gone now. It really is just mark-up and CSS.

Just thought I’d clarify.

Yes drupal 6 is a lot better on this part. However you still have sometimes to copy/paste functions to template.php (look at the breadbcrumb as a tiny example, why is he lost on includes/themes.inc file ? you have to know well drupal to know such a thing... ).

Quote from: nyl at Aug 31, 2009, 05:28 AM

Yes drupal 6 is a lot better on this part. However you still have sometimes to copy/paste functions to template.php (look at the breadbcrumb as a tiny example, why is he lost on includes/themes.inc file ? you have to know well drupal to know such a thing... ).

True, but that’s an example of poor/unfinished theming. That could (and *should*) be a template file. Hence me making my comment about "bad module developers". In theory that sort of thing doesn’t need to happen any more. In practice it does. It’s amazing how many of the legacy core modules are the worst offenders too! =(

Anyway, decided guys! I have a new company starting next month. It’s an open source software consultancy. I’m going to try and build it’s website in MODx instead of Drupal. Perfect opportunity for a test drive. =)

Quote from: greg.harvey at Aug 31, 2009, 05:33 AM

Anyway, decided guys! I have a new company starting next month. It’s an open source software consultancy. I’m going to try and build it’s website in MODx instead of Drupal. Perfect opportunity for a test drive. =)

All the best in your new venture!...(more so the company and not necessarily your test drive)

cheers/k

Since I have known MODx for almost 4 years and built a bunch of websites with it, and now have a good grasp of what Drupal theming involves having actually build one on a complex project, I’d say the approach to theming is radically different.

MODx does not get in your way or force you into learning complex naming convention of template inheritance concepts. Working with MODx is like working static websites for a designer, with the benefits of making it dynamic with a few easy tags and snippet calls. With MODx you never loose the global perspective of what you’re doing because MODx is template centric. Template variables, snippet calls or chunks are added to a single template. Yes snippets can have their own templates stored in chunks (like wayfinder or Ditto) but the key pivotal element is the template.

Drupal is, too me, feature centric. When you use PHPTemplate, Drupal has a very structured approach, with naming conventions, a hierarchy, inheritance, overrides... when you look at a page generated by Drupal with the Devel Theme module you can see it refers to a LOT of templates. Templating is "atomized" into a lot of small bits, it’s the result of a very rational/analytical architecture. It’s also a result of Drupal being modular to the extreme, when like me you end up with 100 modules for a website, it also often means many more templates. It ends up being quite bloated. The design process is (to me) quite painful, even when you get the logic behind it. It takes a lot of learning, and makes designing 3 times longer than the same design with MODx. Also, maintenance is made harder with the sheer number of overrides any complex website is bound to have... I document everything with Drupal for that very reason. Now I am talking templating, and Drupal also has strengths which explain why it’s so widely adopted : a well documented API, a lot of contributed modules, from what nylauster tells me Forms API is unparalleled... etc.

This being said, any time MODx has the required features (I am no developper and the client doesn’t always want to / can’t always fund development of a missing MODx module, snippet or plugin) I’ll pick it over Drupal no sweat

I think we’re entering a very interresting period for the CMS market... Custom content types and/or variables have become a commodity : MODx always had TVs, Drupal has CCK, Joomla now has K2 and even WordPress has a couple of plugins to handle it.

modx Revolution can really change the game if it reaches a critical mass to get enough developpers on board, therefore key addons released, Drupal 7 is going towards a tremendous effort towards better usability (thanks to Mark Boulton) and maybe also a new theming layer (?) and also a new DB layer not unlike MODx xPDO from what I have read, ExpressionEngine is rebuilt using CodeIgniter - enjoying a community of developpers familiar with CodeIgniter will boost EE addon production, I bet...etc.

After reading this, I saw a new blog post from Mark Boulton on the D7 theming process.

Great design requires a singular vision.

Now, when I say design, I mean the kind of design I do. Graphic design, Interaction design — all under the banner of UX. Web design. I think design requires a singular vision that can only really exist in a closed system. A system of control. A system where decisions and solutions are protected from dilution. It’s no coincidence that many design classics are the result of the single vision of one individual. Of course, I include teams in this. Teams of designers can produce stunning work, but usually only under the instruction and guidance of a senior figure, with a vision. An art director. A creative director. Commercially, we’re the fall guys if the design goes bad.

This is what sets modx apart from the other CMS for me. I’m a developer and rely on my designers to make functional websites beautiful. MODx allows my designer to focus solely on the vision of the the design. And I can use modx placeholders + html/css/js to make it work (without hacking or template overrides- just pure code). It’s the perfect custom-website-CMS (of course community-sites, web-apps are different)

The full article is here and very poignant: http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/design-in-open-source

That’s a really nice piece by Mark. He’s had a crappy time over the last week. He saw the nasty side of the Drupal "inner circle" and it wasn’t pretty. You should try and get him interested in MODx. He has a lot of talent and a great design company!