How did you discover MODX ?

I know there's a thread called 'What did you use before MODX' around here but thought I'd start a new one from a slightly different angle.

How did you discover MODX?
Would be interesting to hear how you came across MOD considering it's relatively (until recently) low key and there are much more 'popular' choices out there.

Here's mine.

About 2 years ago I got a call from a company in Dublin looking to carry out some web site updates. Since we had a 3 week delay before we met, I looked at their source code and found a link to their /manager directory. I'd never heard of MODX before but could see the manager page and the MODX logo. Right away, I ordered a book on Amazon, did an install on my web server and started to cram. By the time I met the client I was familiar with their system. At the time, there was no Revolution. Only Evo was available and I think it was 1.0.2

Having tried unsuccessfully to get to grips with Joomla, Drupal and Expression Engine, and frankly feeling quite outwitted by the whole CMS thing, I was really surprised at how quickly MODX made sense to me and how natually it fit into my whole web design / build process. Having used Dreamweaver before, the MODX resource tree was very familiar and helped me visualise the structure of my site. Once I had a basic WayFinder call working and could link up those pages, I was on a roll. A few Template Variables later and I would never again build a site in Dreamweaver. 100 % of our sites are now built in MODX to this day (coming up to 3 years).

In the end, the job I mentioned above never went ahead as the company ran into financial problems and the recession kicked in but my Accountant asked me to help them redesign their site and they 'needed a content management system'. Previously, I had been turning down jobs like this (CMS based sites) as I found Expression Engine, Drupal and Joomla exasperating and complex. A few weeks later, we had our first client using MODX (they loved it) and had built a fairly large site that was scalable, dynamic and built on a powerful yet easy-to-use platform which we felt very at home with! Pretty soon MODX Revo came out of BETA and I decided to focus on that.

3 of the most surprising outcomes from learning MODX are probably:

1. My html and css skills have dramatically improved. Hating TinyMCE means I try to do as much as I can in code view.
2. I find other CMS now a lot easier to understand and learn. Still won't use them though
3. We can say 'Yes, we can!' a lot more to client requests. IE We can offer clients a huge range of development services that previously would have either been outsourced or turned down.

MODX is so effective for what we want to do that I often find myself using it at opportunity possible. IE last week we inherited an Expression Engine site which needed a publications page listing about 25 PDF documents. After a couple of hours fighting with the incumbent CMS, I was *this* close to simply installing MODX on a test server, using getResources and a few Template Variabless to list the MODX pages and serve this into EE using an iFrame. Crazy, huh?

Anyway, this is not a jibe at other CMS systems but just a story about how we discovered and started using MODX.
Would love to hear how you came to MODX too. Was it an accident? Did you stumble across it on a forum, hear about it from a mate or inherit a site already running it?

Great thread and initiative … now pinned! Thanks for starting this.

(didn't you see this coming, Ryan?)

I had bypassed Etomite for a site I was working with because while I liked its "tree" document structure, it didn't have web users. Then during further Google searching I ran across the MODx extensions to Etomite, and recognized one of the developers, Ryan Thrash, as the designer of the Thrashbox, a method of creating rounded corners, which I had been much impressed by a couple of years earlier. The rest, as they say, is history.

I find that the Thrashbox has been getting around. The last comment to this is interesting. http://isaiah.posterous.com/reworked-thrashbox-stack#comment
http://www.clubosc.com/oscommerce-v3-and-thrashbox.html

I discovered MODx plugin from Etomite community. I started building a custom map based survey tool based on Phase (pre-Etomite) back in 2004 if I recall right. Then I finished the job with Etomite and shortly after that MODx people left Etomite and started a community of their own. Been there ever since from 2005. Sadly I'm not an active MODx developer anymore but still hanging here at the MODx community as it's one of the friendliest and most supportive communities out there.

Lately I have even started playing again with MODX Revolution although I still prefer the lighter Evolution better for my use cases. And I have to say that MODx Cloud sure looks tempting. I think I'll will rent a playground of my own from there.

Hello, first post, but I've been lurking / snooping for a while!

I work as a Project Manager for a pretty high flying fancy web development company in Australia. Since we develop in .NET, and I only know PHP, I've been doing sites on the side for about 4-5 years. We current use 3 CMS's, Umbraco, Sitecore and Kentico which are very flexible CMS's in the .NET world, and I had a client wanted some real control over their site so I started looking for something beyond the typical nasty hacky like CMS'es for something truly flexible to allow me to design how I wanted.

I cant tell you how many I installed to either be disappointed or just struggled to work out how I was going to make it work for my client. After being treated to the likes of Umbraco and Kentico, when I came across Modx, I knew I had hit CMS gold.

Then came Evolution. From the moment I installed it, and set up the content section I was amazed. How could something so self explanatory exist? I took to it like a duck to water.

I Introduced a Developer friend to Evolution, and he opted to try Revolution. I was scared of Revolution at the beginning because I didn't want something overly powerful, I just wanted something to work, Evo already did that for me.

I bit the bullet a few weeks ago. Installed Revolution for a new site I was doing. It blew my mind. Now, thanks to Revolution, I am addicted, Im trying to take on more work, just so I can CMS the hell out of everything! My last project I set up a dynamic CSS that they could update and change their background colour and all other general site backgrounds so they could customise their site with complete freedom and not even need to know CSS / HTML.

I came across MODx the first time when I started working for a webdev company in Stockholm a couple years ago.
My first project for them was basically learning MODx Revolution on the go while making a semi-simple website for a client.

Before MODx I was using Expression Engine for a couple sites, and Joomla for a couple sites. Tried Wordpress a little bit, but never liked it.
I totally fell in love with MODx from day 1, and I'm using MODx for all my projects

Now I'm getting into xPDO a little bit together with MIGXdb.

In the pub for me. I was chatting to some other guy about music and next thing you know we're talking about web dev/design and CMS's. I was banging on about the "Big 3" and he kept saying MODx is better, which i could not see. So obviously i was like "What are you talking about, i've never even heard of it! Tell me more." So we settled down by a lovely log fire for a beverage, to talk of tales of the past and MODx.

I must not have believed it was worth looking in to, or had forgotten about it, or was just too lazy because I recall not checking it out for quite a long time after. Anyway one day had one of those moments where you think 'I wonder what's out there...' And i remembered MODx'.

• Downloaded MODx Revo
• Installed
• Built Website
• Fell in love
• Ate my whole collection of hats!

I Love MODx. And MODx Cloud is bloody brilliant as well. Make sure to get yours, im getting my package this month!

With love,

Alex

My roots in website coding and what my whole perspective formed from was through hand coded HTML, SSI and Perl in the late 90s. Recently an art gallery I'm working at asked me if I could re-fresh their 8 year old website. Obviously I would need a CMS for other members of staff to use, if it was for myself I would happy to use a text editor and FTP program for the most part.

I've always somewhat loathed the forced frameworks that most CMSs try to impose on site structure and I first attempted to shoehorn their quite specific requirements into a Joomla and Wordpress structure with very little success and great very frustration. Then I remembered Modx which I looked at several years ago when looking for a CMS for someone else's site but at the time Modx was about to make the transition from Evo to Revo. Revo wasn't ready and I was weary of using Evo since I didn't want to implement a system that may be abandoned within a year.

Anyway, back to the present and after a day of playing around with Modx it became apparent that I could structure the site exactly the way I wanted to, in fact any way I wanted to. And what I was most pleased with was that the style of implementing the CMS into an HTML page was so much like what I'd grown up on with SSI and bits of Perl and PHP.

The first site took a few weeks to get going as I learned the ins and outs of Modx but the second I did took a matter of days to get running on Modx once the HTML and CSS were done. Still a lot to learn but there isn't a design or structure issue I've had to bodge to get working as wanted like I've had to with other CMS, everything I've been able to do in a clean and precise way.

Modx is actually making me like CMSs.

In short, I stumbled on it.

I've been an app and tool developer for over 30 years. But I'm not a traditional "website" developer and am not up on the very latest with HTML5, CSS3, JS or PHP frameworks, etc. These days I'm primarily a .NET developer, but I host my site at DreamHost which supports a LAMP stack. (DH is a huge shared-host provider and also provides dedicated virtuals.)

My static business site advertising my products and services was built with DreamWeaver but I've been wanting to migrate to a CMS for years. When friends ask that question "you work with computers, can you build me a website?" my response has been to install Drupal with the idea that eventually they'd be able to support it on their own. That never happens. Drupal has always been a thorn in my side for Many reasons which I won't go into right now. Suffice to say I've been looking forward to spending my holiday season re-working my site in a different CMS. I'm not interested in Joomla or using WordPress for an entire site.

DreamHost offers One-Click installs for noobs. I don't load these but I'm always interested in their "hand-picked" offerings. One offering is ModX Evolution, which I've been avoiding because it looked like a 1.0 offering, too low profile, and the website here was just downright confusing. But I decided to take a closer look. I came to understand that Evo isn't Revo, so I went through the install and decided to dig in and see where it goes.

My personal thoughts so far (and subject to change) include the following:
- The community is helpful, courteous, and passionate.
- The software is of excellent quality though of course not perfect.
- There aren't that many plugins, but that's OK. It can grow with time and has obviously done so.
- Plugins need more standardization: They should all have descriptions, not just a list of updates for people who already know what the plugin does. Outdated plugins or those not recommended for use should be clearly marked.
- Evo should get it's own subsite separate from Revo. The mix is confusing to a newcomer.
- The forum is a great resource but has too many dead links and old/invalid discussions which clutter searches for help with software someone has just downloaded. The site is somewhat unfocused and I find myself trying to learn by going to too many disjointed resources.
- I believe this software has a deep past and a good future, but it can't grow without better grassroots marketing.

My short-term goal is to continue re-implementing my site with Revo by becoming more familiar with the details. Based on feedback here I will also recommend to DreamHost that they look into offering One-click installs of Revo, if possible, and at some point stop offering Evo - or at least offer Revo as well. I'm already actively suggesting that they re-evaluate their list of dead or dying packages which they are encouraging their users to install.

Over time I'd like to work toward becoming a contributing member of this community, maybe helping to address some of my concerns above. I don't know if I'll ever be qualified to write PHP plugins but we'll see. I want to make my site more dynamic to issue product licenses, etc. I'd also like to see what can be done about styling my existing apps to agree with my new ModX implementation (BlacknBlue theme), including WordPress, SMF, Mantis, Piwigo, OpenVBX, and others. And of course I'd like to start using ModX to help friends and family get started with their own sites - but I suspect that will continue to be a challenge.

Thanks!

my friend told me about modx.from than i m using modx.