Quote from: DocMartin at Mar 20, 2008, 11:48 PM
There’s relevant alertbox from Jakob Nielsen - on website usability, but could apply here too.
Includes:
One of usability’s main laws is that "designers are not users."
...
Open software often falls into this category: designed by geeks, for geeks. [!!]
- well, seems to me that best open source should mix aiming for users, and coders/developers who both advance projects and, hopefully, build websites [wasn’t always case at Joomla, say]. As you’ve found with modx - and I’ve experienced w drupal, the software also works for non coders, albeit need some geekiness. Having info/instructions to suit such a broad user base is one of the challenges.
I made an attempt in the site listed in my sig to bridge the gap between the geekness of MODx and the minds of relatively naive users. Let me know if you have any suggestions on improving it.
Bob
Hi Max...:
Ah, something like Apple would be a dream! - I think Apple info can be very strong; of course usability rocks; and if you’re geek type, can open Terminal n off you go, say.
(If Jobs n co running Modx, would it still be 0.9.6, w 0.9.7 months away, when some cms up to 6 and onwards, even tho some might rate modx higher?)
... and Bob:
Yes, seen your guides, and like them - influenced me to give Modx a go.
Can’t recall too much I thought could be changed; maybe a bit more re navigation - when on modx page, have links to other pages in side column and/or at bottom of article. If you’ve time n energy, images would be good.
Maybe, though, better if the guide also on modx site, or somehow combined w existing info... [ah, too ideal maybe!]
been real slow replying here, as haven’t had time to spare for "playing" w modx these few days.
Hopefully will find some more time, and will post back, contribute a little if into position to do so.
Martin
Martin,
The best way of "playing" is to get the music going and devote several hours to it in one session. If you have not created a local test environment using MAMP (or the Windows equivalent) then do so. Once MAMP is working then download MODx onto your desktop. Make four copies of that archive folder and give them names. Then install all of them. I really found having several installs going at the same time helped as you can really experiment with different sites, snippets, CSS, templates etc. If anything goes wrong then just chuck the folder away. I found this helpful when testing parts of MODx. I would mess around with a couple of test sites and once I had a snippet or page section working I would then add it to the "real" site. This way each component of the "real" site would be tested, understood, and the navigation tree would be nice and clean etc.
I am sure other folks who were newbies had other experiences or techniques but this helped me get over the hump as it were...
Max
