Hello All,
After installing MODx on a Linux/Apache site, I’ve spent a few days scouring the MODx site, the forums, the Wiki and many, many reviews found via Google, while trying to decide if I can recommend MODx to the higher ups in our publishing company. Forgive my lengthy post, but I’m trying to get some perspective on using MODx for large data sets. I’ve read this entire thread, by the way.
I’m very impressed with the MODx concepts. I like the extensible ’hooks’ a LOT.
As some background, I wrote my own Perl/MySQL CMS, which I use at:
http://worldcommunity.com/journal/.
It has only around 300+ articles, so I’m safe for awhile, in terms of that 5,000 limit
.
However, I used the very same software for the publishing company I work at for my day job, for 3 of their magazines, quite successfully. The CMS I wrote contained articles for the 3 mags, plus a number of micro-sites, with a total of about 15,000 articles. One mag had 7,000 articles. My program (WCN:SQL) wrote out all of the pages to static html files, and used "section pages" to display paginated lists of documents in each section, with Previous and Next links. The section pages were also static files. I never ran into a problem with maxing out, because the Perl code created the Next links using MySQL’s limit clause, and then translated that into the appropriate filenames. It took about 1-2 minutes to write out about 7,000 files, which we did every time an editor added or updated a story.
Here’s an example of a paginated section from my smaller site:
http://worldcommunity.com/pages/s.0001/t.p0001.html
That said, our publishing company has moved on to a so-called "enterprise" system that we all now officially hate (Ektron). The magazine that had 7,000 articles probably has 8,000 or 9,000 by now, and will continue to grow. Many of the 30+ mags in our new larger company have multiple posts each day, so things add up really quickly over the years.
Also, it would be nice to have one MODx install for 3 or 4 mags. It is of course possible to have one installation per magazine, but the mags belong to groups, and the way we have it set up now is that the editors from one group log in and can take care of the 3 or 4 mags in their groups. That would mean, however, that the numbers would jump from 7,000 to many more, based on the group.
So, I’m looking for something better and faster than Ektron. My old system won’t quite cut it, in terms of desired features, (and it’s a one-man endeavor, so it’s not being considered
.
Is there any clarity at this point, in terms of the real upper limits of MODx Revolution?
It seems to me that it’s not only the caching issue, but Ditto itself that may have some problems. I’ve been searching for the code and explanation of how to display paginated pages of sections that have hundreds of articles (like my system did, see above), and it seems like Ditto is the snippet everyone uses, but some of the posts in this thread seemed to say that Ditto would choke on large numbers of records.
Is there an extension that just has the Previous and Next links, without the numbered links, that might be a lot quicker?
Besides the cache issue and Ditto, it seems that the Manager Tree might get unwieldy with 8 or 9 or 10,000 documents.
With Ektron (and with my Perl system), one can simply page through the documents, with Next links, and/or search for docs to edit, so it doesn’t get unwieldy.
Finally, although this is slightly off topic (but will get back on topic really quickly), our magazines (and mine too) use "multi-section" pages, like this:
http://worldcommunity.com/pages/c.0001.html
to display a certain amount of links within a section, with multiple sections displayed on the page. The above link only displays one article in each section, but it could be 3 or 5 or whatever. The order of sections in the multi-section page (or "category page") can be set in the CMS.
Can MODx do that as well? Would that have to be done by placing one Ditto snippet for each section, by hand, on the category page? It would be nice if it was automatic, so that when one added a section to a larger category, the section displayed on the multi-section page. But I also saw higher up in this thread
(and this IS on topic) that having multiple Ditto sections on a page with large numbers of articles makes the page very slow. So that’s a problem. It seems that Ditto is parsing through all the records, or did I read that wrong?
Based on all of the above, do you think MODx Revolution will fit the bill?
Thanks for what looks like a great program!
Peter Brown
MODX Staff
MODX Staff