MODx for my small community?!?

Hello, I’m looking for a (free) content management system for a small community (<100 members) and I wonder if MODx could be worth a try. These are the requirements:

- Clean code
- Clean appearance
- Valid XHTML
- "Serious" project like Drupal, Typo3, Joomla,... w
- Not bloated
- Good media management (for galleries), integration of youtube-videos
- an easy user-integration with phpBB or vBulletin or similar would be great but is no "must"
- Many availible good templates or
- a calendar that can be integrated into iCal, Outlook etc.
- certain "core" members should have a own profile, that they can modify.
- I want to have certain "page types" like "add a new event page in the events section"

Is MODx right for me? I tried:

- Drupal:
Very good first impression, but somehow a little bit messy with all those modules in different versions and translations. Not good themable, more a framework than a cms to me.

- Typo3:
Too much complexity out of the box. Too many workarounds neccessary even at the beginning.

I have good programmic knowledge - but unfortunately not php... But XHTML and CSS are no problem. To be honest: I don’t want to see much code when working with the cms.

Would you recommend MODx? Are there any sites around with a similar focus?

Quote from: timH at Sep 23, 2007, 02:15 AM

I have good programmic knowledge - but unfortunately not php... But XHTML and CSS are no problem. To be honest: I don’t want to see much code when working with the cms.

Others may disagree, but this suggests to me that MODx might not be right for you. MODx has some powerful features and meets almost all of your other requirements (I don’t think You Tube integreation is available yet). MODx, in its best use, however, is a developer/designer platform and I don’t think you’re likely to get it to do everything you want without some use of PHP.

Much work in MODx is done with snippet calls which mainly pass parameters to PHP code. They do sometimes work right away without you having to ever see the PHP code. But often, you need to debug them and that means thinking like a programmer and, sometimes, looking at the PHP code to see what it’s doing.

I’m not sure what you mean by "programmatic knowledge," though. If you have some fluency in C, C++, Access, or Visual Basic, you may be able pick up enough PHP quickly to do what you want.

By far the best feature of MODx is this forum, where many helpful people will go out of their way to help you solve problems with your site.

Bob

I have much Java experience, even in big projects. Coded some C++ and also PHP. Frankly my current website is a bunch of self written php fragments. But very simple: Include some files, connect to a MySQL DB and so on. I don’t think skills will be a problem. A few years ago I wrote my own image gallery creation tool in php. But the reason to use a cms is that I don’t want to code that much by myself ;-) Can I use MODx modules out of the box?

Quote from: timH at Sep 23, 2007, 02:46 PM

I have much Java experience, even in big projects. Coded some C++ and also PHP. Frankly my current website is a bunch of self written php fragments. But very simple: Include some files, connect to a MySQL DB and so on. I don’t think skills will be a problem. A few years ago I wrote my own image gallery creation tool in php. But the reason to use a cms is that I don’t want to code that much by myself ;-) Can I use MODx modules out of the box?

That’s really a tough question to answer because it depends on exactly what you want to do. I would say mostly yes.

Put another way, I don’t think you’ll find anything better out there, especially if you’re like most of the people here and fount Joomla and Drupal wanting.

The sites I’ve done in MODx have required very little PHP coding on my part. Photo galleries and news summaries are a piece of cake. I haven’t done a community site so I can’t comment on the bbs/forum aspects though.

Bob

There is a pretty steep learning curve for MODx, and you need to be prepared to put a fair amount of time into it. That being said, my PHP is pretty basic, and I’ve done some things with MODx that have impressed me. (Yeah, maybe I’m easily impressed...) The real strength from my point of view is how flexible MODx is. You’re really not limited, and there’s a lot out there already that you can use.