Some standard CMS features

Hello,

Does Modx give the option for the following,

1) Display Article author names in addition to titles via Wayfinder

2) Provide a "Email article" option

3) Provide an "PDF Article" option

All of the 3 are standard features in few popular CMS’s like Joomla ... I’m just wondering, how the above can be accomplished on modx?

Thanks in advance.

1) That can easily be done with tags such as [+createdby+] or [+editedby+]. There’s PHP snippets that can change the number value from the database into a readable name (search the forums).

2+3) I dunno about those, but #2 could be done with some snippet editing. #3 might take some work to do if it doesn’t already exist.

1. Display of author name can be done via Ditto and you can display whatever data there is in the db depending on how you set it up.
2. Email article is doable. It is typically referred to as send to a friend script and yes there is one. (I rarely use this).
3. Print to PDF as far as I know is unique to Joomla! as a standard feature. There have been snippets started but I don’t know if anyone has completed one.

Have you installed modx with the sample data? There is an example of Ditto implementation with author name. It just gets the name of the user who wrote the document.

If you are coming to modx from Joomla, you are going to realize that modx is not at all the same beast. It is not designed to be install-and-done but to allow developers and advanced designers to build out custom solutions for every project without having to start from scratch.

Thanks for the helpful information.

I really like Modx. I totally despise Joomla. It just looks and feels ugly.

I would think that such basic features like emailing articles and displaying author names was a built-in feature in modx but I guess it isn’t.

Quote from: hamD at Aug 11, 2008, 09:24 AM

I really like Modx. I totally despise Joomla. It just looks and feels ugly.

I would think that such basic features like emailing articles and displaying author names was a built-in feature in modx but I guess it isn’t.

Unlike Joomla! modx is designed to be a starting point for a custom CMS and not necessarily an end in itself. If you look at the Ditto snippet documentation you will see that authornames is a very simple change. There is also a snippet for Send to a friend.

Future versions of modx will be installed fairly bare with a post-install resources/elements installer that will allow you to install other elements or none.

There is an existing PDF creation snippet called MakePDF:
http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,19849.0.html

I have used this and it works well. The only problem I had was that the sample PDF file provided was corrupted - it took me hours to figure that out! Just create your own PDF to use as a template (customised with logo, images etc as you wish), and you can output the pagetitle and content of any page or multiple pages to a multi-page PDF by specifying the parent id in the snippet call. Its also easy to customise the snippet to output other fields if you wish.

therebechips,

Thanks for that. I didn’t know there was one. I’ve been here for over 2 years! I learn something new everyday. I’ll test it out.

Cheers,

Jay

Cool, thanks. I’ll try them out.\