Answered Should I rebuild MODX site or try to upgrade to latest version?

I am new with MODX and web development in general. When I started working at my current job a few months ago, they tasked me with learning MODX and making some updates to the company website. They gave me this task because no one else here currently knows how to use it. Also, by me learning it I will be ready to perform any future updates needed to the site and we won't need to keep contacting a 3rd party to do what we need.

I've looked at our site and after watching some videos and how-to's online I noticed how complex and "messy" our site was designed (i.e., we have 62 templates for 20-25 webpages). We are still on MODX Revolution 2.2.1-pl, which I now see is pretty far behind. Our infrastructure guy said he tried updating it to the latest version before I started and it gave him a few errors he didn't fix at the time.

He created a copy of our website on our in-house server so I can test my changes before moving the changes to the production site. He also gave me a copy of the MODX files and sql server on a flash drive because I was going to setup a MAMP or LAMP stack on my laptop to do my testing when out of the office, but the web pages weren't loading correctly so I decided to stick to testing my changes at the office in this environment that is working fine.

Now my main question, after I get these current updates we want to make to the site, I was thinking to clean up and update the site. Would it be better to re-create the site in the latest version? or Learn MODX a lot more and try to update it to the latest version?

Sorry for the long post, and if this is the wrong section for this please let me know where to post it instead, thanks.

Thanks for the reply. I do plan on learning it a bit more, as it is what we will be using for the foreseeable future. I have also heard a lot of good things about it as a CMS.

It does look like there are a couple options to consider after these initial content updates we want to make. And I guess re-building it will help me learn everything that much more.

I'm not sure I agree with Bruno. If you don't know much about MODX, you might end up just duplicating mistakes made by the original developer. I think in your position I would upgrade in place, learn MODX, then think about whether the site should be redesigned before recreating it in a fresh install. Maybe we're saying the same thing.

I think I see what you are saying BobRay. There are some redesigns we want to do, but right now I want to stick to the smaller changes we need made. I want to learn MODX and web development more before I attempt any of the bigger redesigns and style changes we want to do.