I used to use MovableType, then came ExpressionEngine. Its not a free CMS, but it integrated a wiki, usergroups, forums, and gallery in an all in one solution. My site has been based on EE since about 2003 or so, but lately I have been considering a switch to an opensource CMS. My friend set up his site on ModX and I have a testbed setup on my Linux box for playing around with. I have started to grasp a few of the concepts behind ModX as its a completely different way of thinking than EE or even MT was.
I am NOT a programmer by any means. I can twist PHP slightly to fit into my needs, but thats about as far as it goes. I need some answers to a few questions I cannot seem to figure out or find in the forums documentation. Hopefully the userbase can help me out.
1) How do you set up multiple blogs using different template sets and even different URLS?
a) Is it possible in a single install, or do you need to set up a new install for each subdomain, etc..
2) Users: I have several different categories of user and they are redirected based on thier user group, can this be done in ModX.
a) Admin: Acess to all the features of control panel
b) User: Can see the default site and public gallery only. Can leave comments, etc
c) Family: A special group that has access to a "secret" gallery and blog that isn’t even accessible beyond the login screen for normal Users.
3) "Secret Sites" As I said above I have a site and gallery accessible only to Family. Can this be done in ModX?
4) I understand the concept of bridging for a forum. Are multiple separate Galleries possible?
5) Templating seems to be confusing me a little bit. I need to basically recreate the look and navigation of my current site www.ffpblog.com. EE allows me the use of conditional variables and if:then:else statements. How easy is this to replicate in ModX? I hate building a new template for every case, even though I use a modular design. A new "chunk" just to change the page name is a bit redundant when I can use a If Then based on the URL segment and make the page only once.
Not all of these things are Necessary components for the switch, but the basic look and feel of the site needs to be recreated, including the portal page
http://www.ffpblog.com/index.php/ffp/portal
I do like that ModX supports friendly URLs like I have now..:)
Thanks for taking the time to answer my "newbie" type questions.
Oh and a Big Question:
How would I go about importing all my articles/categories, etc from a basic mySQL database? There isn’t anykind of script already created for this between EE and ModX is there? I just restarted from an empty database a year ago and would hate to lose all the history because I can’t manage SQL..lol
