CMS Frameworks

When I try to describe MODx to other designers/developers I tell them it is a CMS Framework. The best of both worlds, you have all the standard CMS stuff built-in, with the ability to "roll your own" if you need to. Today a friend of mine (an Expression Engine user) whom that I trying to switch over to MODx told me about EE 2.0. They are re-writing the backend using CodeIgnitor. I had tried CI before, but gave up since they I had to build a login system from scratch. Now it seems things are changing.

http://expressionengine.com/blog/entry/expressionengine_20_fully_codeignited/

So it looks like MODx will soon not be the "only" CMS Framework.

Just the only free one.

That why I didn’t go EE!

They did come up some nice ideas for the admin.
http://expressionengine.com/ee2_sneak_preview/

Check out the movie!

I really like "accessories" custom tabs of content. Does anyone have to time to create a module for this?

MODx one weak point in my opinion is the admin for non-techs. Is there any chance that something ManagerManager will be built-in?

i’m especially interested in integrating PHP frameworks like Cake or Zend into MODx for f.e. module development.... is that done before?

Olaf

Quote from: bwente at Mar 17, 2008, 02:23 PM

MODx one weak point in my opinion is the admin for non-techs. Is there any chance that something ManagerManager will be built-in?

yap, I agree, MODx admin panel is for geeks. I spent a few hours just to expain to client how to do basic stuff in admin panel.
When I built my own home made CMS for client, they know how to manger with, they just know, not even a sec. on my part explain admin. This is the power of "Design the Obvious"

Tree structures in Modx and inserting tags, is just for advance users, in the end CMS is developed for non-tech. users and not for geeks.

Quote from: olafmol at Mar 17, 2008, 02:28 PM

i’m especially interested in integrating PHP frameworks like Cake or Zend into MODx for f.e. module development.... is that done before?

Olaf

no need for, MODx 097 is build on xPDO, and own framework. why the hell do you want to integrate other framework?
The only lack at the moment is docs. It’s like you got a key for Jet-airplane without user guide how to drive this stuff to the sky

Quote from: bwente at Mar 17, 2008, 02:23 PM

They did come up some nice ideas for the admin.
http://expressionengine.com/ee2_sneak_preview/

I really like "accessories" custom tabs of content. Does anyone have to time to create a module for this?

Indeed EE has evolved in the right direction, it would seem. I’ll put it back on my watchlist...

I was pretty sure they’d switch to CodeIgniter at some point, the benefits are fairly obvious not only in terms of flexibility but also the community... I guess new addons from CodeIgniter community will emerge and that’s good for EE.

The UI change is nice, though some of it is really sugar coating and not much changed from the 1.x branch, it’s a big step in the right direction. The previous UI was what drove me away from EE (I have bought a licence back when it was 1.4. Textpattern was starting to slow down and I hadn’t discovered MODx yet).

Quote from: bwente

MODx one weak point in my opinion is the admin for non-techs. Is there any chance that something ManagerManager will be built-in?

While I agree there is a LOT to do to make MODx’s admin more usable and up to par with the best in class, I sure wouldn’t say it’s that bad for non-techs. I have a lot of unskilled people adding content in MODx, and with very few (if not none) training. Of course I build a nice doc with client’s admin captures and screencast and that’s it !

The main weak points of the UI today for me :

• the ugly MCPUK, we really desperately need a new "resources" browser (I should say file browser since resources will have a very different meaning in the new branch).
• the manager frames and refresh : you can’t pretend being a modern CMS / framework and keep those, we need some ajax goodness

I am pretty sure 0.9.7 will dramatically improve things in this regard. Being able to template the manager with smarty and our own brand of MVC will change the potential for a better UI but also for branding (I have enjoyed this in ActiveCollab 1.x and I must say once you get the logic it’s fun to work with !)... The work being done for the new manager is definitely a big step in the right direction.

Whishlist: a cool video preview of 0.9.7.

ModX isn’t entirely frameworky...dataset structure does not define the structure -- hence the kludginess of the solutions for people who use it to creating listing-type sites: jobs, real estate, products, etc.

If you’re using preformatted data, binding it to a template and then have it call it through an empty document (or much worse creating hundreds of needless documents) is a very kludgey solution. The template is where you model data in modX, but the template is also used to control the view. The document should define/model the dataset any way it sees fit, the template merely structure it. It doesn’t happen that way -- yet. As such its not a framework because the model view and controller are in the same place -- the template. Most people don’t define framework any other way. Partly a template is like a modeler because it will autogenerate the forms for a document -- but technically the document content is the only real data, the TVs seems like an afterthought. If you change the template you change the dataset which is stored in documents, which would probably get you expelled from framework school. To be really a framework, the "document tree" on the left side would be a cascading template tree based on inheritance. The data would be abstract and not available without a view/controller. The manager would be that controller on the inside, and your "documents" would be the view/controller on the outside. As anyone familiar with WP knows, you don’t really need "documents" this can all be handled abstractly.

Secondly most frameworks (at least the Web 2.0 ones) also generate the javascript/ajax for you. ModX is close here, you can use snippets in a way that is very close to frameworks...but it is not out-of-box and snippets are not strictly conforming to any language standard (other than php and html). The snippets also do everything. If it was more frameworklike the snippets would just massage the data set and the template would still do the hard work. It is sort of this way, but not really. This is a plus or a minus depending on your needs. Quickedit is the most Web 2.0 frameworklike piece of ModX.

But one place ModX is better than many frameworks is its out-of-the-box role-based user system. I hope the whole manager is opened up to MVC templating and control. This is a godsend for the incompetent who might munge everything confusing roles and create all sorts of security risks. This is reason enough to stick with ModX.

Let me put that more simply, your data structure defines the application in a framework, it does the messy stuff for you. ModX commits you to a document data structure, and everything else is a kludge. However, I get the feeling it won’t be for long. You could build a framework on top of ModX with the API, which if I keep using it and its not the direction they’re going I would do for myself in a less-than-releasable sloppy code way.

We build custom views to large datasets all the time using xpdo running under 096x. For smaller applications, like a 20 product catalog, using TVs and documents works great and customers grasp it well. It’s all about how you use the tools.