subdomains v subfolders v new domains for blogs

Hi Everyone, i would be really interested in hearing your views and experience on subdomains v subfolders v new domains.

I have a MODX website already setup and running live and would now like to add a blog to it. It is however already a big website, with more than 100 pages and we do suffer from some corruption in the MODX Manager and i am reluctant to add the blog to the existing MODX installation and database. I also tried to install the MODX blogging extra 'Articles' to test it within the existing environment and it did affect the existing websites use of getresources which caused some problems.

One of the reasons to add a blog though is to increase the websites visibility on Google - creating the blog as a separate domain would therefore not help in this instance, unless i am mistaken?

What are peoples views on www.blog.domain.com and www.domain.com/blog, in terms of usability and its affect on the SEO of www.domain.com?

I would prefer to install and maintain a separate MODX installation for the blog - can i even do this in a sub folder of an existing MODX installation?

Any recommendations, advice or experience greatly received!

I also tried to install the MODX blogging extra 'Articles' to test it within the existing environment and it did affect the existing websites use of getresources which caused some problems.

What problem was it?

You might be interested to use other solutions:

• http://modx.com/extras/package/gridclasskey
• http://modx.com/extras/package/collections

People start to use one of them because they can convert existing container resource as a grid parent.

I'd make sure that all of your updates are the most recent versions, in the past i've been admin on sites with over 500 resources AND articles installed with a further 100 or so posts with very little problems and issues.

installing modx and having articles on a subfolder needs a bit of tweaking of the htaccess and links but it will work on domain.com/blog if you make the tweaks.. it sounds more like your having problems with your existing install than a new install. i'd get that issue worked on first.

what version of MODx are you running?

Thanks for your responses. I'm currently using 2.2.9 and know i do need to update to the latest version. Have had so many issues with the MODX Manager backend though and 'white screen of death' (where you select a resource to edit it and the entire screen goes completely blank - it always comes down to a different corrupt TV, but takes an awful lot of work to figure out which one and then recreate etc.), i am now reluctant to make any changes that might upset it even more!

In terms of what happened when i installed articles, my existing getresources calls simply stopped working - since it was on a live install i instantly removed the articles plugin, which also deactivated plugins such as 'getresources' - reactivating them sorted the problem, but has again left me nervous as to the best way forward.

My existing MODX install though is slow in the manager and i put that down to the number of resources, hence another reason why i thought a separate MODX install may be a better idea - just concerned that this will reduce the effect on SEO for the site.....

Strange, ive never heard of TV's corrupting through upgrades. I think there might be something a bit more at work there.

Articles shouldnt stop getResources from working, however it could be that the switch &showHidden=`1` needs adding to the display calls if you imported any into articles.

I always re run setup after doing upgrades because the WSOD is usaully through a bad path to the connectors etc than anything - its an infuriating one for sure.

I'd be happy to take a look at it for you at some point if you wish, I would recommend possibly setting up a duplicate for testing the upgrade though before anything is done - a bit of a faff with the paths I admit but its the safest way.

In regards to your original question - having it on a subfolder should not impact the SEO as its still coming from the root domain, its not like you are directing the traffic away from the primary domain. but you will possibly (not always) as i mentioned before have to make some hacks to the parts in articles for hrefs etc

It will be worth looking into the cause of the overall issues though, especially with the vulnerability that exists in pre 2.2.13 installs.

Hi Tyreal2012, thanks for your response. Just to clarify, i haven't upgraded yet - the corruption just appeared after the site being live for 6 months or so - it's happened a couple of times, once the source of the issue was a TV that was used on a single page, so not too much of an issue to fix, the second time it was a user, but it is happening more and more with resources based on a particular template - unfortunately there are in the region of 200 resources based on this template so potentially a massive amount of work if i have to recreate everything in order to fix the issue. I'm about to setup a test site to test the upgrade and blog configuration so will see if this fixes any of the issues i have been having....

It sounds like getResources may have been out of date prior to the installation of Articles, which then installed a newer version which somehow got corrupted. Removing and reinstalling getResources likely fixed it rather than Articles being gorked. You could try installing Articles again, but make sure that getResources and any other packages are up to date first.

The other issues are strange, and should be explored prior to doing anything really. Fix that, because that's not how MODX should behave. Updating wouldn't be a bad idea, but I think try reinstalling your current version first, see if the problems go away and then for sure update to 2.2.14 as all versions prior to 2.2.13 are not secure.

What exactly is the corruption anyway? What happens, and when? How?

When you reinstall, use a fresh copy of your version of the .zip file, and follow the updating your site instructions at the rtfm http://rtfm.modx.com/revolution/2.x/administering-your-site/upgrading-modx

Oh, and if you run into some kind of un-repairable issue with getResources again (as if, everything can be fixed) you can always use pdoResources as an alternate.