Hi there, first of all I’d like to say how impressed i’ve been with ModX. I’ve been trying out a long list of different CMS (Drupal, Mambo etc) and CMFs (codeIgniter, Kohana...) and like many others I’ve finally settled on ModX, for a variety of different reasons (granular user management and easy templating, among others). I’m a fairly inexperienced web developer but I have already developed my own smallish scale CMS for a school website, which is functional and secure (and developed in as close to an O-O approach as i was capable of!). That was a great learning experience and I’m glad I did it for that reason, but I realised that it would be foolish to ignore the (far superior) resources already available, so that’s why I started looking at frameworks.
What I’m interested in is how much freedom other developers give to content editors - for the school CMS I developed, for example, there were a lot of areas which wouldn’t be updated via an WYSIWYG editor, i.e sports fixtures lists which would be updated by entering (or editing or deleting) details in table rows and storing everything in normalised database tables. This helped to give me strict control over the content that teachers were creating. As I started to use ModX, I was trying to think about how I would recreate these types of form based content updates (and was struggling a little bit tbh!), then I realised that maybe this is completely unnecessary, and that all editable page content should just be managed within the WYSIWYG editor. Apologies for the ramble, but I’m curious if anyone has any relevant feedback?
You can control certain specific elements using Template Variables (TV). These can be assigned to user groups which means that only people with permissions can edit them.
Another option is to handle the content management in the front-end using snippets like FDM or NewsPublisher.
I like to keep all the editing in the manager and use TVs to control who can edit what.
Thanks for the reply dev_cw. I agree, the template variables are a great feature for controlling access levels.
I was thinking less about the access issue and a little bit more in general about whether developers like to keep rigid control over the content which user groups are uploading, i.e via control scructures like dropdown boxes, specific input fields for certain types of content (like my example of sports fixtures (date/team/etc) - or if developers are happy to simply provide their user groups with the WYSIWYG editor to upload whatever content they like (without developers meticulously trying to categorise everything and store it within database tables).
I’m not sure if I’m making sense here so apologies for the rambling post!
I personally try to avoid WYSYWYGing it, they add so much code garbage. So I try to control the aspects whenever possible. However sometimes it may simply be easier to give them a WYSYWYG and let them do what ever they want. This is often less work and requires less instructions (who can’t figure out a WYSYWYG these days). I guess it will depend on the project which method to use. But in general the more data control the better.
Before I started using a CMS I would do it all with rigid controlled data entry fields (ie pull downs, check boxes and text fields without editors). Clients found it very easy to operate since there were no margin for errors, but on the flip side they had very little freedom to go outside the box.
