Our sites - thinking about changing from CMS Made Simple to MODx

Hi everyone,

Signed up yesterday; first post today

About 7 months ago, our company built our first commercial website using another CMS - www.cmsmadesimple.org. The site is basically a mix of content pages + a product comparison engine that allow users to compare home loans, credit cards, car loans etc.

To cut a long story short, we’ve just soft-launched an insurance site, a broadband site & an investor site ... but we’re yet to roll-out a similar "product comparison engine" for those sites. Anyway, we’ve been thinking about changing our CMS system for quite some time ... and we were thinking of trying MODx. Now might be as a good a time as any ... especially because we’ve got several more sites (thankfully non-finance ones) in the works too. Would be nice to get a solid PHP / CMS framework in place before we start rolling out more sites.

If anyone else out there has tried both CMS Made Simple Vs MODx, any pointers about pros and cons of both systems would be gold. We’re mainly looking for something that’s scalable (ie, can handle 50,000 users per month) and that has a solid tech framework to build extra components upon.

FYI, if we go with MODx, it’d need to be able to cope with 1,000s of pages & upwards of 10,000 page loads per day ... pretty achievable numbers from what I’ve read on the forums so far.

And yeah yeah, I realise the sites’ designs still leave a LOT to be desired ... And apologies for having ads on it - it’s a commercial site so has to be paid for somehow (:

Hopefully I’ll have some better sites to reveal in the future. THANKS

I think this is a logical step from CMS Made Simple to MODx and while part of the logic is different, some things are similar and should make it easy for your designers/developpers to get into MODx.

For instance :

• Global Content Blocks in CMSMS => chunks in MODx
• Tags in CMSMS => snippets and plugins in MODx (Note to MODx users : tags can be associated with events, which make them akin to MODx plugins)
• Modules in CMSMS => Modules in MODx

Also, both CMS use a tag based templating, with a good separation between content and presentation and thus easy to achieve standard compliancy & accessibility.

Now the main difference and key improvement of MODx over CMSMS is Template Variables. Most systems have a rigid way to structure content. Usually, content has a limited structure: Title, Summary, Body. Extensions (like the news module in CMSMS) sometimes offer to manage different types of content (images, products, job offers…): but again, they force you to use a predefined content structure which does not necessarily fit your particular needs. When they do offer a way to create custom content fields, they are either limited in number or in types. MODx has no such limitations :

• You can create any type of custom content fields: text, rich text, number, date, images, checkbox, dropdown, email, url… with no limitations whatsoever. The best part: you can do so directly from the backend, without ever having to alter the database structure manually.
• Each custom field is linked to a given template: that’s why the custom fields are called Template Variables in MODx. It allows you to define which templates can use the custom variables, and possibly define several content structure if needed
• You can use, style and place those content field easily: a simple tag, [*my_template_variable*], and you can display the content wherever you like, the way you want it displayed. Better yet, if you need to make it available for frontend editing, just add a # before the variable name [*#my_template_variable*]. Pretty easy, uh?

As for scalability, you seem to have researched it already, we have several examples of high traffic MODx powered websites indeed.

Hi David,

Thanks for the info - apologies if my last post rambled on a bit, I’d had a few beers before posting it.

The main issues that we’re hoping to fix if we change to a new system is getting to a more OO / MVC framework style of code base ... just to be more transferrable with code from site to site etc. Another big nice-to-have for us would be the ability to run multiple sites from the one installation - just read that that was coming in 0.9.7 http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,12104.0.html

Here’s hoping that makes it. The other CMS / framework we are considering is Expression Engine & its associated MVC, CodeIgniter.

Haven’t played around with either system as of yet - not MODx, CodeIgniter nor Expression Engine - though certainly interested to have a look at them all. Anyone’s input on their experiences with any of these systems is welcome.

Whatever system comes up trumps, you guys are to be congratulated - seems like a marathon of extremely-talented work has gone into MODx already ... and you’re only just starting out. Nice one

Thanks

EE is also a very flexible system : I used it 3 years for a website I ran but ended up dropping it mainly because of the poor usability of the backend (that’s only my opinion but while I am a fast learner, even several months using it I ended up wondering where this or that feature was buried in the menu ). This being said, templating in EE is really nice and you can also to some extent use a custom data structure. Personnally, I chose MODx over EE, but I am a sucker for OS projects Code Igniter has a good rep’ and it seems to be pretty well documented.

The OO/MVC part of MODx is best summed up here if you missed it : http://modxcms.com/transforming-modx-oo-mvc-orm.html

I think MODx is one of the most flexible systems, but the path to 1.0 will push this even further !
I’ll let devs jump in and tell you about this in more detail if you’d like (but you can find great post already in the forums about this).

I was in doubt between EE and MODx before committing. In my process I felt that EE was very good, but after spending some time with MODx it was an easy choice. After working on a few sites with MODx I am very happy with my decision. I am a fan of OS projects and the good community here makes a difference. Another thing is the atmosphere here at MODx, there is a bit of electricity in the air with the development of features at a very fast rate and with the upcoming 0.9.7 and the eventual 1.0 release.

Thanks for the feedback. I’ve asked a couple of the "real" dev guys to take a look under the hood of both systems.

dev_cw: is there any chance you could show any of the sites you mentioned you’ve done with MODx and are "very happy with"? If you don’t want to publicly show off your sites I’ll understand - maybe a PM if you prefer to not show them off to everyone!

Having used multiple CMSes since 2000 (and being involved in the build of a proprietary .asp one as well), I know that if we choose the right system from day one, it could save us a lot of headaches further down the track. At some point, we’ve got to jump in with both feet - just would be nice to get wet with proverbial tropical reef water, rather than the rude shock of a grey winter puddle. sorry if I lost anyone with that metaphor!

ciao

Nice metaphor
And sure yes the choice of day one is key !

What did your devs tell you from looking under the hood ?

Ah but back to your question : you’ll find most of us publish their websites in the "You and Your sites" forum, lots of examples there !
Another source for great MODx website is Ryan’s post on our blog : http://www.modxcms.com/modx-looking-back-looking-foward.html

Bottom of page, there is a list of website by category... lots of new ones have been created in the meantime, but it’ll give you an idea

@timthesurfer: All my MODx projects are in development so I cant give you any URLs yet. I can say that I am working on a very large site for a university and one for a corporate group. Both have totally different requirements and MODx has been able to deliver well so far. The biggest problem (if you could call it that) is that there is rarely one way to do things in MODx, which means that you still need to think and be creative. Unlike many other CMSs where there is only one way to do it.

As ganeshXL stated once you get to use Template Variables and some of the other cool features your chin will drop and the fun begins.

I was looking for Ryan’s blog post, that list is a good example of what can be done worth checking out.

That’s the link I posted just above

Quote from: ganeshXL at Sep 05, 2007, 06:03 AM

The only concern would maybe be the load-time of the tree-navigation in the manager menu when you have tens of thousands of documents. If you’re storing the pages neatly in folders and sub-folders, and don’t need to expand all folders at once, I don’t see how this could be a real show-stopper though...

It certainly can and should be a show stopper.

On a site with under 900 pages, expanding the document tree either slows everything down drastically or causes 500 errors both within the manager and on the rest of the site.

I actually came to the forum today to ask for help on this problem.

I have spent a lot of time importing the site into Modx, writing snippets, etc. If I cannot find away of reducing the load caused by the doc tree I am probably going to run Modx locally and use rsync to update the site. Not a solution that would be acceptable to everyone. I can make do without dynamic features, but it is still far from ideal.