I am seriously confused! (newbie)

hello,
I would like to start by saying that I am very new to all this, so I would appreciate any kind of guidance.
The thing is, our professor must be out of his mind! We had five classes on html and php and now we are assigned to do a project in modx.
We have to design a journal web side, with articles that can be searched by date ,authors and tags (among others like rss, calendar, forum, ext)
I spent the last 3 days trying to learn how to use this modx software, but I seem to fail miserably.
So please help with the following issues:

1. How do I upload this articles that my journal is supposed to have?
1.1 Will each article be a different web page? or a document like .doc, and .pdf?
(what I have to do is similar to this page: http://www.springerlink.com/content/m5045407522w/?sortorder=asc&v=condensed)

2. How will I be able to control where the modules in the web page appear? I mean, if for example I want to make a poll available at the home page of the journal on the bottom left, how will I be able to do it?

Thanks in advance!
ps. I have read I great amount of documentations and tutorials, so if I missed the ones answering the above questions please link me to them!
ps2. Excuse my bad English..

Hmm, Actually you didn’t ask anything! or i must say not specifically.
The easiest way to understand the way MODx works is by installing demo contents at the time you install the MODx on your localhost application, & the fastest way for you to understand how or what you can get as much as you want is by browsing the resources of MODx.

1. Documents (web pages) are created in the Manager, and are stored in the database:
http://modxcms.com/editor-documents.html

2. Dynamic functions like forms and polls are provided by snippets (bits of PHP code):
http://modxcms.com/adding-snippets.html
http://www.modxcms.com/resource-listing.html?tags=polls

Feel free to log in to my site’s manager (link and login below) and see how things are done.

More help:
http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/Beginner%27s_Guide_to_MODx
http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/Basic_Blog
http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/Tagged_blogging_with_Ditto

The previous posts have some great links, good reading.

The thing is, our professor must be out of his mind! We had five classes on html and php and now we are assigned to do a project in modx.

Just curious, what class is this for? Sounds like fun, I wish I could have played with MODx in school

Anyway, I recommend that you install MODx with the demo content and play around with it. I find that this is the best way to get to understanding. The best is to install it locally (on your PC) so you do not need to be connected so that you can study anywhere anytime. However you can also install on a hosting server as well.

1. How do I upload this articles that my journal is supposed to have?

You can either log into the manager and simply add new documents (pages) to your journal section. Or you can have a private section in the front end and use a snippet like NewsPublisher to add new posts. I recommend just using the manager since it was built for this.

1.1 Will each article be a different web page? or a document like .doc, and .pdf?

This is really up to you. However it is a good idea to use one document (page) per article even if it is a .doc or .pdf. The page you showed is a index page listing articles that are on other pages, in order to build this easily in MODx you would use Ditto to display parts of your articles this is why you would want to have each post in it’s own document.

2. How will I be able to control where the modules in the web page appear? I mean, if for example I want to make a poll available at the home page of the journal on the bottom left, how will I be able to do it?

First of all they are called Snippets not Modules in MODx, better get used to the terminology This is where your HTML class will come to play. THe output of snippets is html, in most cases you can control the output via a chunk which allows you to build the output to be exactly the way you want (this is one of the best features in MODx). Therefore you would just place the snippet in the html where the output code would go. Go through the wiki post "Beginner’s Guide to MODx", it has a few nice examples of placing your snippet in the html template.

http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/Beginner%27s_Guide_to_MODx

And most of all have fun.

Quote from: xrisanthi at Jan 20, 2008, 12:44 AM

hello,
I would like to start by saying that I am very new to all this, so I would appreciate any kind of guidance.
The thing is, our professor must be out of his mind! We had five classes on html and php and now we are assigned to do a project in modx.
We have to design a journal web side, with articles that can be searched by date ,authors and tags (among others like rss, calendar, forum, ext)
I spent the last 3 days trying to learn how to use this modx software, but I seem to fail miserably.
So please help with the following issues:

1. How do I upload this articles that my journal is supposed to have?
1.1 Will each article be a different web page? or a document like .doc, and .pdf?
(what I have to do is similar to this page: http://www.springerlink.com/content/m5045407522w/?sortorder=asc&v=condensed)

2. How will I be able to control where the modules in the web page appear? I mean, if for example I want to make a poll available at the home page of the journal on the bottom left, how will I be able to do it?

Thanks in advance!
ps. I have read I great amount of documentations and tutorials, so if I missed the ones answering the above questions please link me to them!
ps2. Excuse my bad English..

xrisanthi, We’re trying not to do your homework for you, but it does sound like a pretty difficult assignment for a beginner.

Here are some additional ideas to get you started.

http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/Installation_Guide -- Installing MODx.
http://bobsguides.com/MODx.html -- General overview of how MODx works.
http://bobsguides.com/getting-started.html -- Short tutorial on getting started using MODx.

For your specific assignment there are several ways to do what you want, but I think this will be the simplest way to get started:


For starters, you’ll need three pages on your site, a home page, an "Add a New Article Page" and a container document for the articles. The home page will already be there when you install MODx. Use "create a new document" in the MODx Manager to create the two others. Create the "Create a New Document" page and make sure "show in menu" is checked. Create the "Articles" page and make sure "container" is checked. Make a note of the Articles page’s document ID (shown next to the name on the left after you create it).

You won’t actually "upload" the articles, you’ll enter them on the "Add a New Article" page on your MODx site. Edit that page by right-clicking on it in the menu tree at the left and selecting "Edit document" In the content window, put [[NewsPublisher? &folder=`nn`]] (replace nn with the document ID of your articles document). When you visit that page, you’ll see a form for entering the article (along with the Author, Title, etc. MODx will store each article as a "document" in its database.

On your home page, you’ll use the [[Ditto]] snippet to show summaries of the articles and some information about them like the author and publication date. To understand Ditto, go here http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,13533.0.html and download the .zip file.

Hopefully, that will get you started.

Bob

Thank you all, for the quick response! I will try to see everything you suggested. I feel already more confident, just knowing that I am not alone. I can’t thank you enough!

ps. Dev_cw: I am at university, and I took a class that is about web designing (although I never saw this coming), I have absolutely no previous experience with all this (sadly enough!).

I am at university, and I took a class that is about web designing (although I never saw this coming), I have absolutely no previous experience with all this (sadly enough!).

Sounds like a cool course, great that they recognize MODx as a good learning tool. I wonder how they made their choice since MODx is not as mainstream as others but is definitely the most flexible. MODx is not the easiest management system, but it is the one where you have most control.

I guess we will be seeing you around the forum while you work on your project. As you can tell there are many good people here who will be happy to help. Keep us informed, I will be curious to see how it goes.

Good luck.