Making a sites network

I’m planning to build the websites for my college and its departments. I love the philosophy behind the MODx, so I want use it to do the task.
The scenario will be:
each department has its website, and is responsible for edit and publish its documents;
the main site will has aggregation of documents from every sub site like news, essays etc.
How should I implement the scenario? By using top collections as roots of departments’ resource? Or make new contexts as roots of them?

Another question, how can I specify some users as “Author” (can create\edit own documents\publish own documents) like in wordpress?

Thanks in advance.

I would use contexts, that way each department can even have its own domain. To aggregate resources, you can use getResources or pdoResources to aggregate content from given contexts, by default they'll gather from all contexts according to the parent resources you specify. [ed. note: sottwell last edited this post 11 years, 9 months ago.]

As far as the users go, while the MODX user permissions system can be complicated and hard to understand at first, it's very powerful and flexible, and was in fact designed for exactly this sort of use case.

Thank you! sottwell.

I will follow your advice.