Articles or Custom Tables?

Sorry for my English, French is my first language.

I'd like to hear from experienced developers or members of the team Modx

I would use the Articles resource 4 times in a website, is it recommended?

1) one to manage approximately 60 projects, with the addition of 2 per year

2) one to manage publications, about 80 with addition of 4 per year

3) to manage approximately 50 events per year

4) to manage news (blog)

I know some of you tell me to create custom tables. But my current knowledge will asking me a lot of effort and time to be comfortable with custom tables. This is one of the reasons why I would use Articles

The other reason is that I would like to leave my client a website created with Modx Add-ons only, which will be easier to maintain for him.

Thank you for your advice

Ultimately, it depends on what you are doing. I've set up my website around Articles and having a dynamic number of Articles Containers. However, unlike your situation, each container is a separate blog.

That said, Articles Containers, themselves, are not nearly as important as the Articles themselves. Each Article type may have a different compliment of TVs and layout. Articles (as an extra) is exremely versatile despite the possible mucking around you might have to do to get it to work.

I sympathize with your position as I have had to do it myself, and unlike many here, I would fully agree about using Articles to accomplish this. It would have taken weeks to utilize and test custom tables (as well as templatize, design and style the output). Using Articles made it approximately 2 days.

jber, people will need some more information before we can give a more accurate answer to some of your questions. Note also that I would not call myself an "experienced developer" - I hire an experienced developer when things get complicated. But in general I would only use custom tables as a last resort.

So, some thoughts:

Projects and publications: Is Articles suitable for managing your projects and publications? That depends on what you mean by "manage". Do you want to simply keep a record of what is being done, a record which is editable by various users? Or do you need to model elaborate workflows? Or are your needs somewhere between these two extremes? I would need to know more before venturing an opinion.

News/blog: Articles was designed with blogging and news stories in mind. It's ideal for this.

Events: You can take several approaches here without using custom tables. As it happens, I've just been weighing them up.

First, think about using a system which simply reads Google Calendar. The advantages of a Google-based system are:

• The interface is widely known
• Google has designed the calendar for intuitive updating by the end user.
• Third parties continue to create enhancements and integrations.
• Access to it can be granted outside MODX.

The disadvantages of a Google-based system are that it is fairly limited and difficult to extend to allow e.g. a URL for each event, a graphic in the event listing, extended descriptions. Google Calendar does provide an API that will let you write a custom application that uses the Google Calendar database as a backend via the extendedProperty class. See:
https://developers.google.com/google-apps/calendar/faq#ext_props
But this is probably more work than can be justified.

For an example of using Google Calendar with PHP, see the Google calendar feed by James Cridland at:
http://james.cridland.net/code/google-calendar.html
This works and is very easy to bring into MODX. It provides title, date, "from" and "to" times, and event descriptions.

There are also at least three MODX alternatives:

The EventsX snippet seems to be no longer maintained and lacks power.
http://modx.com/extras/package/eventsx


The Church EventsCalendar snippet (not just for church events) allows guests to request events, and has flexible fields.
http://rtfm.modx.com/display/ADDON/Church+Events+Calendar


The mxCalendar snippet is more widely used than other MODX calendar snippets and worth a long look. It appears to take some care over tricky issues like time zones and is under heavy development. Documentation is scattered but OK. Bugs continue to be reported, but at least they are quickly addressed.
http://rtfm.modx.com/display/ADDON/mxCalendar


On mxCalendar, see also:
https://forums.modx.com/board/272/mxcalendar
http://charlesmx.com/software/mxcalendar-revo.html


You could also look at implementing Easy PHP Calendar. For details of how this can work with MODX, see http://www.gregorysmart.com/2010/04/08/modx-calendar-integration/ [ed. note: shorewalker last edited this post 14 years, 1 month ago.]

If you want to have it more customizable you can also create your own CMP to manage event-resources:
http://rtfm.modx.com/display/ADDON/MIGXdb.Manage+Events-Resources+in+a+CMP+with+help+of+MIGXdb

this could also easy be switched from using resources to a custom-table