I decided to dip my toe into the CMS waters after years of hard coding sites by hand, FrontPage, Dreamweaver, etc. The concept of CMS and CMF was a new and foreign concept.
I wanted to create an intranet for my firm and developed one by hand by purchasing modules from different vendors for the menus, articles, galleries, file management, etc. I had one fully working only to trash it in the end because of usability issues (each vendor’s plugin created confusion amongst the content authors) and upkeep.
I tried
DotnetNuke, WordPress, Joomla, Mambo and Drupal and didn’t feel like I was in total control of both the front end and back end. Plus, my users would be frustrated in their content authoring and would either abandon their content authoring or ask me to do it.
And me being a fellow techie, I needed some eye candy in terms of...
- managing the entire framework
- setting user roles (down to which user can edit a particular page)
- extensive and flexible WYSIWYG editor
- content authoring platform the user could be in both total control and limited control
- optional content such as galleries, file repository, etc
So I was looking for not a blogging platform but a website content platform that was both user friendly and powerful on the backend. I ran into
www.opensourcecms.com and was amazed as to how many platforms were reviewed.
I was reading the reviews of another CMS platform and one of the posters mentioned MODx and that little blurb in another CMS’ review is how I discovered MODx.
MODx is very easy to install and then logging into the Manager gave me some serious eye candy! After a few days of getting used to its interface and resulting output to the browser, I decided that MODx was the platform I would go with.
So me being a newbie to the CMS/CMF world, I’d like to grade MODx from worst to first...
F - Frames. Lose the frames in the manager. Full screening the WYSIWYG doesn’t work that great with the frames. But I believe the roadmap says this will be gone soon (I hope).
D - Templating. There is no ability to import templates as the other CMS’ have. However, I do realize that with the other CMS platforms, the template developers pre-package their templates with the necessary CMS tags and the CMS backend would simply import them. It was then up to the site manager to tweak it from there. Whereas with MODx, you have to start from scratch which is good and bad. Bad if you want to get your current look into MODx quickly. But go from the standpoint that you can take almost any template on the web and with a little patience and understanding of how the MODx template tags, chunks and snippets all work together, you can in fact be in TOTAL control of the resulting output to the browser. You can develop quite a powerful template if you take the time, slow down and learn it. With that said, the current templating process will stop or slow most MODx integrators but the message is not to be discouraged and take your time to learn the templating. This explains why there are not a lot of sites out there offering MODx templates.
D - Messaging. It’s okay as-is but the sender should have a copy of the message they sent.
C - User Roles. I’m in the middle of the road on this one. Setting up the user roles is a little confusing (a lot confusing at first) on how to setup access and editing ability. I didn’t realize at first that there was both a manager and web role and that a user can be setup in both. But the beauty of MODx is how granular you can actually setup a user’s editing ability. I think I read MODx’s roadmap that they will simplify this process but to the MODx folks - please don’t lose the granular concept. It is very useful to have pinpoint control on content editing/authoring.
B - File structure. Simple file structure starting with two root folders: Manager and Assets. Nicely organized which leads to easy tweaking.
B - TinyMCE File/Image Manager. Wish there was a way to integrate TinyMCE’s commercial plugins for file and image management. A post elsewhere in these forums was correct in that any integrated file/image manager must follow the open source concept. That I agree with. However, it would still be nice to somehow easily integrate Moxiecode’s commercial plugins.
A - TinyMCE Editor. Wow! Talk about customizing! You can be as pinpoint as you want in specifying which buttons appear in the editor and which row - all within the manager (and not hacking the code). On top of that, you can specify which buttons a particular user can see. User A can have the bold button and User A cannot. Now that’s granular control!
A - Customized Menuing. Not bad control on the menu aspect. You can specify if a page appears on the drop down menus or not. This is great to highlight an important page within the menus and not have it buried. Add to that is the ability to place a page exactly where you want it within the menu structure. Pretty nice.
A - Caching. Confusing at first between page and snippet caching to improve performance (to do or not to do) but again, granular control. Nice feature.
A - Security. Obviously MODx is security conscious and I like the manager and web permissions. This would get an A+ but only if the next version makes it a little less confusing. But to have a strong emphasis on security is a big plus in my book. Very nice.
A - Tools-Configuration. Wow! Granular control at its best! Too many good things to mention here so lets just say that this entire area in the manager is awesome!
A+ - Usability. It’s obvious MODx has spent considerable time in seeking a balance in satisfying the power hungry techies as well as empowering the content authors with the tools they need. This goes a long way in my book.
I’m sure I missed out on other features worth grading but I’ve only been using MODx for a few days. So IMHO, MODx is a great CMS/CMF out of the box. It does lack some features as other posts in this forum point out but so far, MODx is pretty good as-is.
All in all, I’m glad I came across MODx and look foward to its future. They deserve their Most Promising CMS of 2007 award. Now lets work on CMS of the Year award!
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MODX Staff
