Okay, we started our site with Front page barely knowing html. Now it’s been some time and we’re currently using Dreamweaver with templates, but I believe it’s time to move into a CMS. I have managed to install ModX and figured out how to add pages with it. Here’s where I am lost. One, we have lots of content to move over. Probably like 600 pages or so. I am mostly having problems with the navigation aspect. I do not want one long list of links on the side bar as shows up now when I add a page.
If I don’t click the "Show in Menu" button I can’t get the page to show live. If I do click that then I will end up with a massive list of links when all is said and done. I guess my questions are this.
1. Do I have to click "Show in Menu" to get the page published and live on the site. And if I don’t what do I need to do and what am I doing wrong that it’s not showing up.
2. Any help with navigation if I don’t want ALL the links to show up in a category. Ultimately I’d like the category to show a page like a news page does where it will show a title, blurb, and link and maybe 10 or 20 articles to a page. Is there a way to do this? Can someone point me in the right direction?
Also, if you could be dummy friendly that would be super. I truly am not stupid, but for some reason this is totally overwhelming me.
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MODX Staff
- 12,272 Posts
You might consider organizing your content into a hierarchy of documents. Think of the tree menu as a sitemap. Does that make sense?
Ryan Thrash, MODX Co-Founder
Follow me on Twitter at @rthrash or catch my occasional unofficial thoughts at thrash.me
If the "published" checkbox is checked, the page should be live and available through a direct link to it. I think the "show in menu" checkbox is just a flag that the Wayfinder snippet can use to decide whether to show it in the menu or not. If you’re not using Wayfinder for your menus, it shouldn’t have any effect ans, even if you are, the pages won’t show in the menu but are still "live" and accessible.
BTW, in MODx, organizing the site in a hierarchy shouldn’t affect your SEO because the pages can still be accessed by SiteURL/pagetitle if you have friendly URLs on. The hierarchy will be used by Wayfinder to organize the menus but won’t affect the page URL because, in MODx, all pages are accessed as if they are siteURL/index.php? ID="pagetitle." If you look at the site in my sig., the site is in a hierarchy of directories but all the pages appear as just bobsguides.com/pageTitle no matter how deep they are.
BTW, I migrated from Dreamweaver and, if you use Dreamweaver templates, you’ll want to put all the stuff in the non-editable Dreamweaver sections into your MODx template and all the editable content in the Content section of each MODx document you create (or in Template Variables you create).
Bob
