Can I do all this with ModX or..?

I have a static recipe website with about 300 pages. It’s ranked well in the SE’s for certain terms and I have new ideas in mind which necessitates a CMS. I’ve explored Drupal to a fair extent and I must say for a non- developer / geek, it’s a steep learning curve. But I love the features it offers but have been rethinking since sometimes to do a simple task it needs a lot of researching and hair splitting days

My first encounter with ModX was about 6 months back and I was attracted to it simplicity. Even though I don’t know PHP, I can customize certain aspects with guidance. And I love the SEO aspect as well.

My goal for the website was to create a community where my site visitors can form a community and contribute content to the website.

Here’s my wishlist for the website: I want to know if these can be done in MODx? :

1. Convert my static website (in HTML) to a CMS-driven website. I want to retain the extensions as they are. I know this is possible in ModX because I have tried the import functionality and it works.

2. SEO - I understand that SEO is a breeze here and one of the reasons I’m attracted. Is it possible to generate URL aliases automatically. Say for instance, I create about 3 pages a day; instead of manually inserting an alias, is it possible to automatically generate a URL alias through the title or the filename?

3. Allow for categorization and subcategorization of topics.

4 . Create context sensitive menus. I don’t really know how menus are created and handled in ModX.

5 .Automatic updation of a page (in a particular category) with the latest articles posted under that category / page. For example, I have a page called ’Food Articles’ - Under this, I write about 10 articles and each time I write a new article, it should be automatically posted as links in the original page of ’food articles’. Similarly there are many pages like these which should have an updated list of links (of articles relevant to that page) automatically displayed.

6 . Forums - What are the options when it comes to forums in ModX?

7. User generated content - I’m guessing I can have two options here - one, whenever a user wants to contribute to the site, he would have to be given access and then he can start submitting content - is this possible? two, Without a user having to login to the site, is it possible to contribute content. Many visitors to my site might not be tech-oriented so I want it to make it simple for them to contribute. The priority however remains that I have to encourage visitors to contribute to my site.

8 . Image Gallery - not a priority now, but it’ll be nice if users can submit their photos and create a gallery.

9 . Videos  - might be something that I want to do in the future ; would be a nice ask if they can embed videos from sites like youtube.

10. NewsLetter - I have seen a couple of snippets for creating and managing newsletters.

11. Blog - Currently I use wordpress and i don’t mind that working in conjunction with ModX.

Well, that was basically my greedy wishlist...I would appreciate any suggestions on doing these in ModX. Thanks.

(Shameless bump ).. Anyone got suggestions?

2 - yes, this can be done by setting the "Automatically generate alias" checkbox in the Friendly URLs tab in the Configuration. It will generate an alias based on the Page Title.

2 - yes, this can be done by setting the "Automatically generate alias" checkbox in the Friendly URLs tab in the Configuration. It will generate an alias based on the Page Title.

Thanks Softwell, I checked this option and it works . I can strike this option off my list then...

You can do everything in your list with MODx, either by using an available snippet, a bridge to an other script (for the forum) or a ’roll your own’ snippet for some specific item. You should have no problem developing this in MODx.

Thanks Dev..Could you please point me to the snippets that achieve those? Abut "rolling my own snippets". Well going by my PHP skill levels, it could take me ages before I make somethingof my own snippet

Deadlyminds, building this kind of project is a pretty big task with any cms.

I would suggest installing MODx with the sample data and see how stuff are being done there.

That way you can narrow down your questions to only a few remaining issues where you get stuck.

I do believe you will get more answers if being more specfic to one issue at the time.

Good luck!

For menus you can do most everything with wayfinder.

Uncle68’s idea is a good one. I would look into learning Ditto (for presenting loops and other sorts of sequential data), wayfinder for menus, webLogin PE for private areas. There area a few others like bridges to forums and other utilities like breadcrumbs and sitemap generators etc.. The key is to be creative, sometimes a snippet is intended to do one thing but can also be used in other ways.

One thing that is a bit of a mind boggler is htat every snippet has its own way of configuration, some will accept parameters in the call while others will require actual editing on the snippet file.

Anyway, I think that you could pull off the stuff that you mentioned without too much problems in MODx. Enjoy.