Front-End Editing and Forms / Rights Access?

Greetings Community,
I have been developing sites with Joomla and Drupal for about three years, and have reached a point where I need a more flexible and customizable system. I'm an "intermediate" developers who is ready to design and code in a more "open" manner, without always using plugins or pre-made templates for everything. ModX makes a lot of sense to me!

After a long search, I am really centered on learning ModX Revolution. I've read all the documentation and generally understand the way Revolution works.

But there are two areas I'm still trying to figure out...

1. Front-End Editing and Form Creation:
For many sites I'm building, I want to give my customers a way to edit their "articles" from the front end without needing to access the control panel. Of course, this involves building forms for people to create the "article" to begin with, then pulling up that same form to edit the "article." How is this done in ModX? Which extensions are used for this? Even better, how can I do this just with ModX core -- without an extension?

2. User Rights:
I sort of understand how Revolution handles user rights. But specifically for Front-End Editing mentioned above, what's the right method for determining who can edit any given "article"?

Generally, ModX really makes sense to me, and I like very much how design is totally open and free. I feel like most of the system is almost self-explanatory! It's just the two areas above that I am unclear about.

Thanks,
Matthew

Matthew first of all welcome to MODX, hope you enjoy the ride.

1. You need to install Login to allow your users to Login to the site via the Front End, read the documentation here.

2. For Front End Editing I recommend you use NewsPublisher which is a great extra that can be customized in order to edit any page, read the tutorial here.

3. If your going to just allow your client to edit on the Front End you can just create a new user group that only has access to the web context, add a new user to this user group with admin privileges and you should be set, read the official security docs here or my ACL tutorial here.

Also check out my MODX Tutorial site CMSTricks it might help you out if your just starting with MODX.

Good Luck.

Greetings benmarte,
Thanks for the quick response. I should say that I'm "new" at ModX only in a sense -- I've been playing with the idea of switching for about a year now. But I'm ready at this point to turn my attention more fully to it.

My preference is to design and develop with "pure" code/CSS solutions and just using core ModX features, rather than plugins. I'm imagining that this is more possible with ModX than with other CMSs. For example, I'd rather just build forms and then allow front-end editing using built-in ModX capabilities. Coming from Joomla/Drupal, I've really grown weary of "extensions." Then again, maybe extensions are different in ModX?

I'll take a look at the resources you cite and investigate further!

Thanks,
Matthew

Matt,

The Login extra was developed by the senior core developer of MODX so I'm sure it's an extra you can use without worries.

NewsPublisher was developed by BobRay who is the author of the MODX Official guide so these are extras you should use but you can create your own as well but if you want to save time you can use them.

Good luck.

Hi benmarte,
Thanks again for your help!

I'm sure the extensions you cited are good. I do not mean to criticize any specific ModX extensions! I'm coming from Joomla/Drupal, where a lot of extensions impose too many design/coding assumptions on the site. From what I can tell, ModX extensions do not do this. But I have to take time to get beyond the idea of bad extensions.

I'm trying to learn about NewsPublisher now.

Matthew

There are a number of "extras" that were developed specifically to fill certain common use cases. Here are a few that I "don't leave home without"! I think you'll be pleasantly surprised with how MODx extensions work.

http://rtfm.modx.com/display/ADDON/AdvSearch
http://rtfm.modx.com/display/ADDON/FormIt
http://rtfm.modx.com/display/ADDON/getResources
http://rtfm.modx.com/display/ADDON/Login
http://rtfm.modx.com/display/ADDON/MIGX
http://rtfm.modx.com/display/ADDON/Wayfinder

Greetings sottwell,
Thanks for compiling that list!

I should add that I also developed a bit recently with ExpressionEngine. I really like EE a lot, but after I lost a couple of non-profit projects because the cost of EE + crucial extensions made it unfeasible, I started looking at open-source systems that have the same capabilities as EE. That led me to ModX.

Thanks again,
Matthew

Basically how this works is you have your MODx core installation, and you can pretty much ignore it. The extras are in themselves mini-applications that work within the core framework; these are what you work with to build and cusomize your site. They all have extensive configuration options, and MODx provides several methods of configuring them. They all also have their own mini-template capabilities for customizing their output.

Wayfinder is a good "snippet" to examine, as it supplies one of the most basic functions of any dynamic website, dynamic nested menu structures. By default, it generates a simple nested unordered list, reflecting the structure of the Resource Tree in the manager. It is also good to examine since it exemplifies the best of "the MODx way" when it comes to development practices.

Of course, as you've already clearly learned, every site is different, and no matter how flexible and customizable any existing extra may be, the time comes when it just doesn't quite do what you want. And there is where MODx really stands out. You can either extend and modify an existing extra that almost does what you want, or develop your own.

I think you would find these examples to be interesting, even if they don't fill a need that you have right now, they are fascinating examples of extreme MODx development and what can be done with MODx by thinking outside the box.

https://forums.modx.com/thread/78039/tutorial-create-seo-ajax-framework-revo-2
https://forums.modx.com/thread/77735/ro-ides-editor-and-framework-for-modx-revolution-2-2

Greetings,
Thanks everyone -- you are giving me lots of material to review!

To Sue: I've had your site bookmarked for some time now, along with http://modxvideotutorials.com/

I'm definitely looking forward to building my first full ModX site.

In the meantime, I'm open to hearing from others who have sites with the features I've described.

Thanks again,
Matthew [ed. note: MatthewSchenker last edited this post 13 years, 11 months ago.]

Careful, my sottwell.com site is for Evo. While parts of it would still be applicable to Revo, such as basic usage of templates, chunks, TVs, etc, most of the "under the hood" descriptions are definitely not applicable to Revo.

I'm gradually building up a Revo site at http://free.sottwell.modxcloud.com/ but I still have a long ways to go before I understand the workings of Revo as well as I did Evo.