MODx Android App

Hi everyone,

maintaining a MODx site and presenting it to a customer is always kind of hard when I bring my tablet. Especially when I talk someone into using MODx instead of Wordpress, for obvious reasons, I have to talk myself out of trouble by telling him that his professional website should not be maintained on his phone or tablet, when he asks if he can maintain it through an app.

So, here's what I wanna do (guess what...). Being a J2EE developer myself, I doubt it's that hard to build something that maintains a MODx site through the manager backend.

Now what I wonder: Is there any sort of API that can be exposed to the outside, so I can use XML instead of having to remote each and every MODx website through HTML, that might be subject to change after all.

The App would of course be open-source.

Features:

- CRUD for the entire resource tree
- full access to TVs inside a resource, template, etc.
- publish/unpublish, edit everything in the main-resource formular
- Articles Support (probably the most important feature)
- File Upload (very important, in addition to Articles)

Won't-Implement:

- support for media sources, except for file-upload
- user management, security in general
- anything else that is just unnecessary for the quick-fixes people are going to use this for

Did anyone start anything like this yet? I did some research and didn't find any active projects regarding this matter. So. I want this. For myself and of course for my customers

btw: if there's any sort of XML-API that I can use, out of the box, I am of course open to feature-requests

Andreas

You can try Handyman, it is design for mobile devices ..

Hi and thanks for the quick reply.

Good enough as a solution for now, thank you for that, I am definitely going to use that. But I think, for the future of MODx, it's way better to have an actual open-source native client up and running. Every professional CMS offers something like that, and it's weird that MODx doesn't.

When this thing reaches beta status, people will probably want to contribute and add more functionality. Just saying

Andreas

So you want to have the manager available on mobile devices? Is the extra HandyMan from Mark Hamstra an option?

http://www.modxmobile.com/
http://rtfm.modx.com/display/ADDON/HandyMan

Ah, too late with my answer, Larry was quicker

Just checked HandyMan out. Way better than what I expected, but still too complicated in my opinion.

I am very excited about Marks approach, using jQuery Mobile. Very responsive, very slick and it has sort of an app-feel to it. Not to mention killing multiple mobile-birds with one stone.

But still, way too many clicks to just update a piece of content. Too technical in my opinion. I wanna give this to a customer that has ONE(!) open page open for editing. The way it is right now, the UI is wasting way too much screen size.

This is exactly why I want to build an app for that. MODx is great for building hand-tailored stuff. I always use a lot of form-customization (one of the greatest features in MODx) to give the customer what he needs, and more importantly, ONLY what he needs. Most of them are not in any need of the Elements tree or any other tab then the main-resource one. And even parts of this one are not necessary to most customers, so MODx does a great job in giving you the opportunity to just customize everything.

Most CMS users are not the ones who set it up in the first place. I want MODx to be used a lot more by actual customers than some geek who set it up - no offense The best way to do that is making it "available" and more understandable to the general public. Right now it's not really available, because most agencies I know are using Wordpress, Typo3 (yuck...) or even crappy Joomla, because they're used to these.

A huge step into the right direction would be building stuff that people can use out of the box. Which is why I think that an app is a great idea.

So... is there an XML API for the manager?