Hi!
Being a modx newbie I first ordered "MODX: The Official Guide". Now that I'm approx. 80% done with the book (great ressource by the way! Thanks!) I'm glad I voted for using modx as our company's next CMS.
I'm a lead developer at a small company in western germany. From what I've seen from modx I'm completely confident, that none of my staff will face serious trouble using modx. Unfortunately it won't be us developers using modx all the time, but the other departments (e.g. marketing) as well.
So we aim to make the editor's usage experience as nice as possible. We had a few approaches with other CMS, where all of our content editors had a lot of privileges. This resulted in plugin/addon-mania. Marketing and sales nearly killed the site with new content, styles, "things that could be nice", ..., you name it.
We'd like to try a different approach with modx this time. The editor should only see the absolutely minimum of input fields in order to run and manage the site. Our web designer was asked to design a very simple template, that could be driven by just a few user inputs:
Navigation
------------------------------------ ----------------
|Headline 1 | | Contact Form |
|Content 1 | | |
------------------------------------ | |
|Headline 2 | | |
|Content 2 | | |
------------------------------------ | |
|Headline 3 | | |
|Content 3 | | |
------------------------------------ | |
| |
------------------------------------ | |
| | | | | | |
|Tile 1 | Tile 2 | Tile 3 | Tile 4 | | |
| | | | | | |
------------------------------------ ----------------
Each page has three content blocks. Each content block has a title and the actual content.
No wysiwyg editing allowed, just the headline and a few lines of text. There will be a custom content background image behind the three blocks that can be selected by the editor. Our designer will create a few backgrounds to choose from.
The contact form is visible on every page and does not change very frequently. The editors do not need to edit it.
The four tiles just contain a title which links to a page and a background image.
The editor should be able to choose which title, link and background is used per tile.
It would be nice if we could define default tiles and override them on a per-page basis.
As you can see, we really try to separate the responsibilities here. We design the framework, the designer creates background images to choose from and the editors just provide the raw text.
I learned from the book, that the content part is easy to set up. I'll use template variables and form customisation, so that every ressource shows only the necessary fields.
The contact form will be a chunk/SPForm combination - the editor does not need to handle this one.
But what can I do with the tiles?
The first shot would be to use 4 chunks for the tiles, but I don't wan't the content editors to mess with HMTL input (maybe breaking the layout). Therefor I'd like to use something like template variables, but for chunks.
I only need a two text inputs (title and Ressource-ID to link to) and a background image dropdown per tile.
I could use a seperate template and an unpublished ressource as a "container" (similarly to the EZFaq snippet). But somehow mis-using a ressource that way feels wrong.
I also could add the needed fields to the standard template as tvs and set default values as properties (or leave them empty so that a snippet picks up the default settings). I could even list the "tile setting tvs" on a separate tab using form customisation. That way I could override the default on a per-page setting.
Maybe I'm overthinking it, but I am really eager to make the editor's first contact with modx hassle free...
Any insights and shared thoughts are very appreciated!
Thanks,
Nico
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