Find the back-end way too hard to navigate

I’m a freelance web designer and up until now I’ve always worked with a php/mysql CMS I developed myself. I’m happy with it but as I’m getting more work I’m lacking time to make necessary updates to the CMS. So I thought now would be the right time to delve into some open-source CMS’s to see which would suit my clients best.

I ended up with modx because I have some limited experience with it. I’m happy with the system as it is quite easy to implement my own design into the CMS. However, I’m not happy with the back-end seen from my client’s point of view. They believe it to be way to hard to browse to the page they want to update. After that, they’re presented with lots of form fields that are of no interest to them. Because in 90% of the time, my clients are basically just editors. They want to edit website content and not design. So they just want to add pictures, news items, edit some texts, eventually add a movie and a hyperlink. Pretty basic.

So it would be awesome that after they’ve logged in to the back-end, they’re presented with a navigation that contains the same buttons as the front-end website. No things such as "snippets", "chuncks" and all that jazz. They click on a page and can then edit/add content to that page. That’s basically all they need to see. The more is on the page the more confused they get.

Am I missing something in Modx?

Thanks for any advice!

Am I correct in understanding that you just want to prevent them from even accessing the back-end? If so, do what I do. Set up a separate login account for the client and set it to redirect to the home page. With QuickEdit enabled (and with QE edit-tags in your template), they can easily edit the content that they’re looking at on the page. Make sure that (for that user) you have a javascript text editor like TinyMCE enabled.

From what I’ve been reading, 0.9.7 will have smarty templates for the manager area, meaning you can do just that...display what you want when you want to.

Until then I’ve had enough success with managerManager to make things that are of no interest to clients invisible.
Setting a TV to a document group works well too for making things invisible (where @inherit will suffice or such) when for example a content editor logs in.

All the best,
Taff

Thanks for your replies. I’ll look into the things you’ve all mentioned. I’m not so much of a fan of front-end editing. So I guess I’ll need to check out the special "editor" role and the managerManager thing.

One additional question though: do you think it’s possible to have some kind of a multisite manager? Let me explain my situation more in detail. If I check out the abovementioned and I like what I see and I decide to go for modx, I’ll have a few clients who’s site would be running on modx. Of course I could install modx on every client’s webspace. But do you think it would be possible to have modx installed at my own domain webspace and manage all my client’s sites through one single modx install?

It would spare me quite some setup and maintenance time. Yet this situation is probably not what modx is meant for?

Quote from: bytte at May 08, 2008, 05:55 PM

Thanks for your replies. I’ll look into the things you’ve all mentioned. I’m not so much of a fan of front-end editing. So I guess I’ll need to check out the special "editor" role and the managerManager thing.

One additional question though: do you think it’s possible to have some kind of a multisite manager? Let me explain my situation more in detail. If I check out the abovementioned and I like what I see and I decide to go for modx, I’ll have a few clients who’s site would be running on modx. Of course I could install modx on every client’s webspace. But do you think it would be possible to have modx installed at my own domain webspace and manage all my client’s sites through one single modx install?

It would spare me quite some setup and maintenance time. Yet this situation is probably not what modx is meant for?

You might be in kind of a bind if you don’t like either front-end or back-end editing.

As for multiple sites on a single MODx install, this is part of the design of MODx 0.9.7 (not ready for prime time yet) but really isn’t practical in the current release versions. OTOH, once you’ve done it a couple of times, the MODx install is fairly quick and painless.

Bob

Thanks bob. Good to hear it’s in the pipeline.

Hehe, I do like back-end editing if it’s very simple and clear for non-tech-savvy clients to use!