Advice about a certain strategy (pagination, large collection of documents)

Hello all,

I have been using MODx for a few sites and I really like it but I did not go any further than simple sites with a few pages and one or two contact forms. All went well with that. Now I really did not spent too much time with MODx but I would like to know a few things about it.

Most of the time when I need to design and code websites I use a MVC/ORM framework like CakePHP or Spring. But MODx really attracts me, its fairly easy to understand and it presents a menu-driven manager that I can use for my clients. This is good because I don’t need to code my own managers anymore. On the other hand there are situations I find easier to solve with these above mentioned frameworks then with MODx.

Imagine the following: I need to build a website for a client who owns a large building, more then 200 rooms. His clients can rent these rooms for their businesses. Now my client wants a website with a big list with links (paginated) of all of his clients and their ventures. Each of his clients get a few private pages, like a ’homepage’, contact form and a page to present whatever they want (rich text).

Now the questions begin for me. What plugins/snippets/modules do I use to do the following? Or should I code them myself?
- How do I make a big paginated list in MODx? Can I use the MODx manager to manage this list and how?
- How do I make and manage the clients private pages? I assume I don’t need to make seperate documents (in the MODx manager) for each private page I want. Ok, but then, how do I do it?

In other words; How can I manipulate the manager in order to easily manage the list and all the private pages without ending up with huge lists of MODx documents?

I don’t expect fully working code here, or even any code. But please help me with ideas or directions I could use. What snippets or modules should I take a look at? All advice is welcome.

Thanks in advance,
- A MODx beginner.

craze:

- How do I make a big paginated list in MODx?

You could make each "clients" home page a container for all of their sub-pages. Then use ditto to go through the document tree, and generate a list of all the tenants of the building( only going 1 level deep so as not to include each clients sub pages ).

- How do I make and manage the clients private pages?

I am assuming that your client wants to turn over all management privileges to his clients for each ones respective web-space on his site. You could create a user group for each of your clients clients, and then associate it with their respective section(container). This would allow you to maintain overall access to every part of the site, while limiting each client to their respective section of the site. If every single client is going to have their own content and design, that is under their control, you may end up having to create a fairly complex document tree.

I am currently in the initial stages of designing a site of similiar function, and have been leaning towards rails for this specific application. Maybe someone else with a little more experience in Modx will have a more complete or better solution.

Best of Luck

Ditto is used for making lists of documents.

I created a much smaller version of your requirement, only involving a handful of clients, but the same principle would work for as many as necessary.

The client logs in and is sent to a page. That page is AJAX-driven to query the database using the client name as a filter and display a paginated, searchable data grid with that client’s data. Of course, the data displayed does not need to be in a datagrid format if that is not suitable, nor does it need to be AJAX.

You might find something to at least get the ideas going here.

http://www.sottwell.com/article-extjs1.html
http://sottwell.com/database-module.html