Downloadable Content?

Hi everyone,

ModX has put me in a very smiley mood. This is the first CMS in which I’ve read the entire templating documentation and actually understood everything

I’ve always been unsuccessful with CMS’s as I’m strictly a designer and can’t decipher code to save my life - so I’m trying my luck with this one!

I have a quick question just to start me off:

I currently have a site: http://www.stemplate.com which I built a while back in tables, with no content managemant (I manually updated it). I’m now looking to build it in XHTML tableless CSS and make it content managed with ModX. From reading through a lot of tutorials I feel that I can figure out all the news updates and general content updates by myself. What I want to know is if it would be possible to create the download sections as being content managed without any programming experience.

In short, would it be possible (using existing addons) to create a page like http://www.stemplate.com/icons.html complete with pagination, with a simple backend where I can just enter the info, upload the file, upload the image and BAM that new downloadable PSD has been added?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, as would a nudge in the right direction

Yes indeed it is, there are a couple of snippet packages for that. Take a look in the Resources section:
http://www.modxcms.com/FileDownload-502.html
and
http://www.modxcms.com/FileUpload-804.html
will make a simple system, while
http://www.modxcms.com/FileDownloadPlugin-1191.html
provides a more heavy-duty file download application.

Thanks for the reply!

I looked at the first one http://www.modxcms.com/FileDownload-502.html you mentioned and it seems quite close to what I am looking for

I don’t quite understand where it gets the description from however? It says it’s from a chunk, but how would I manage the content of the chunks and correspond them to the separate downloads. I quickly read up on chunks though I’m still a bit confused.

Thanks,

I think you need to define the chunk with the info...

&chkDesc:
default: null
values: the name of a chunk
description: The chkDesc parameter allows descriptions to be added to the file listing included in a chunk. All of the files and descriptions should be listed in the chunk using the following format: path to file/filename|description||
example:

chunk name: fileDescription
    chunk content:
    assets/snippets/filedownload/test.pdf|This is a test pdf. It shows report stuff.||
    assets/snippets/filedownload/options.gif|These are the options available to you.||

Check out all the parameters here:
http://www.muddydogpaws.com/development/filedownload/parameters.html

Thanks for that.

I’m still a bit overly confused just looking at it, so I’m going to try and integrate it and see what I can some up with.

From what you can tell is it definitely customisable using the templating to achieve what I want to achieve without coding knowledge?

Yes, it’s just a matter of making the chunk template with the HTML that you want to show, then telling the snippet which chunk to use for the template. Usually what I do is create the new chunk and copy/paste the default HTML with just a bit of extra text like "chunk test..." in it, then call it in the snippet, to make sure I’ve got the snippet call correct and it’s using my template chunk. Then I edit the chunk to suit myself.

If you have not done so yet, take a look at the examples page, this should help you get started.
http://www.muddydogpaws.com/development/filedownload/examples