Explaining the advantages of MODx

Hi there

this is possibly a question for the core team, but other people may want to chip in.

I’ve been asked to give a presentation on open source content management systems by a certain large online auction company (yes, that one) - with a view to influencing their future internal development practice. Now as part of this I want to highlight MODx and some of the key concepts it employs that I believe make it so easy to deploy highly usable, standards compliant web sites. While I like to think I have a developed a fairly detailed understanding of the system over the last 2 years, I’m a little hazy on the direction that MODx is taking with 0.97/xPDO; specifically, how the new core architecture has advantages at the enterprise level. Also, I’d be interested to hear what you think the advantages of MODx are, both from a designer’s and developer’s point of view. What should I focus on? What do you see as the key content management problems that MODx solves (and others don’t)?

Many thanks

Mark

Your post is reminding me that we still have to put together a marketing kit for this kind of situations... I hope to have more time this summer when clients are cooling off a bit

In the meantime, maybe I can provide some valuable input.

Benefits of Open Source

As for the benefits of open source, I have found great insight from Pentaho, the goal of the article is to offer kind of an hybrid model between open source and commercial models but it offers insight on both those model as well :
http://wiki.pentaho.com/display/BEEKEEPER/The+Beekeeper

A selling pitch for MODx

I wrote a selling pitch for MODx a while back - it could use some dusting off (and the tone is highly promotional) but I think it still can help - here it is :

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MODx is not ’yet another content management system’ : it’s a modern web2.0 ready content management framework featuring a robust and flexible API allowing webdesigners to create highly customized, accessible and standard compliant dynamic websites. You might say : well that sounds nice, but what does it actually mean ?

Well, it means…

You’re free!

With MODx you have your “Get out of jail” card : you are not bound by the system the way you are by most content management applications :

• Take control of your designs!
  The systems works for you, not the other way around

It’s called (real) separation between content and presentation. Remember having to hack the core code of a system, a plugin or module to get your layout and styles to work as expected, fix standard compliancy or accessibility issues? Well, forget those unnerving, annoying things. With MODx you get :

• A simple and powerful Template system: MODx doesn’t use a template engine, adding a layer of complexity and rigidity to the system. MODx uses a built-in tag language. You can use tags to display variables such as document attributes, systems settings, template variables, chunks…
• Micro-templates for granular control over content: to go one step further, MODx gives you the ability to define “micro-templates” which allow you to control precisely how and where you want to place the output of a Snippet (through what we call placeholders).
• Dynamic stylesheets: No-one would challenge the fact that dynamic web pages have brought a revolution to the web. To this date, dynamic stylesheets (a.k.a server side css) are still rare. With its flexible document types, MODx is able to parse stylesheets and allow you to add dynamic elements to your css, via tags and snippets : pretty handy to have a dynamic path for images when moving from test to production server, or randomize a background : whatever you can imagine is possible !

• Create and take advantage of your own content structure !
  Forget rigid content structure

Most systems have a rigid way to structure content. Usually, content has a limited structure: Title, Summary, Body. Extensions (plugins, modules or the likes) sometimes offer to manage different types of content (images, products, job offers…): but again, they force you to use a predefined content structure which does not necessarily fit your particular needs. When they do offer a way to create custom content fields, they are either limited in number or in types. MODx has no such limitations :

• You can create any type of custom content fields: text, rich text, number, date, images, checkbox, dropdown, email, url… with no limitations whatsoever. The best part: you can do so directly from the backend, without ever having to alter the database structure manually.
• Each custom field is linked to a given template: that’s why the custom fields are called Template Variables in MODx. It allows you to define which templates can use the custom variables, and possibly define several content structure if needed (need a product catalog ?
• You can use, style and place those content field easily: a simple tag, [*my_template_variable*], and you can display the content wherever you like, the way you want it displayed. Better yet, if you need to make it available for frontend editing, just add a # before the variable name [*#my_template_variable*]. Pretty easy, uh?

What’s the catch?

The selling pitch is nice, but what’s the catch here, looks too good to be true!

Well of course no system can be everything to everyone. Flexiblity and power has a price. Unlike most CMS, you won’t find a template installer, nor will you find a module/plugin installer. Though it’s quite fast to learn if you have a decent knowledge of website design, MODx is not a “one-click” foolproof system. Why is that?

Because being built by professionnals out of frustration with existing solutions, it naturally aims primarily professionnal webdesigners (also pro-ams – geeks – power users) who are looking for a tool to build highly customized, accessible and standard compliant dynamic websites.

Now does that mean MODx doesn’t care about the end-user? Sure not! It aims the end-user but as content managers or editors, not websites builders. Many opensource content management project have chosen to try to satisfy the end user first, focusing on  the range of built-in features and one-click-install systems which in the end makes the application less flexible.

The MODx team has made a different choice, and it might be why professionnals love it so much !

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A few marketing resources

Here are some threads or pages I have bookmarked because they contain valuable marketing material :
MODx as a business weapon
Simplicity Sells

And the classic "perspective" blog post from Ryan (with a list of showcase websites at the bottom too) :
http://modxcms.com/modx-looking-back-looking-foward.html

The new 0.9.7 branch

I still have to put together something coherent and I don’t have much time at the moment (on a deadline...), so I’ll let others (devs ?) jump in on this one.


We need a Marketing Kit !

I realize I am throwing a lot at you in a single post, all this would need to be synthesized but that will be the goal of the marketing kit. I’ll try to get a draft ready for this soon but it’ll have to take into account the added features/benefits of the new branch, as you point out.

David thank you for your comprehensive reply. You make some excellent points that are compelling for designers, and Ryan’s post provides a highly useful insight from the development side.

One feature that you mention, and that I find extremely useful, is the ability to rapidly model and create views for varied kinds of data in the document tree by defining custom templates and fields. This has saved me countless hours, but the best bit is how easy it becomes for client to manage the data in a structured way. I’d love to know how this will be develop - will documents become nodes that can represent any kind of resource? Going on from that, it would be interesting to hear how MODx 0.97+ will fit in with the idea of being a framework for building web apps. I’ve used Codeignitor for some time and love it, but I suspect that MODx will begin to offer similar flexibility but with the advantage of an extensive and highly customisable content management suite.

:)

I am sure our dev team and experienced users can add to that mix and I’ll sure make a use of this later to build the marketing kit

Again my experience with 0.9.7 is too limited at the moment to provide useful feedback, and not being a developper I lack the insight to answer those items. Definitely TVs are really a big plus, I have recently set up a simple Ditto call to export the data stored in TVs into a CSV file and my client can use it in a variety of ways (one of them being able to communicate usable data for print purposes).

The benefit is also that it becomes very easy to export data stored in TVs into a custom DB by then importing with CSV LOAD DATA, each TVs can then be converted to a custom DB field and this can also be useful. The really powerful thing is that I am no developper and as a designer MODx enabled me to do this a bunch of hours !  And I am talking current branch

I don’t know yet how TVs will evolve, one thing I very much would love is for TVs to be tied to documents instead of templates as this would allow to reduce the number of templates and increase flexiblitity. But I am probably thinking in the line of the current branch, 0.9.7 benefits from xPDO and I still have to really understand what "model definition" and "mapping persistent objects to platform-optimized relational database structures" will mean for MODx (and for my brain lol)  It’s a big leap and while I can almost grasp the concepts I still have to see examples and have people help me into it...

Quote from: therebechips at May 16, 2008, 10:04 AM

One feature that you mention, and that I find extremely useful, is the ability to rapidly model and create views for varied kinds of data in the document tree by defining custom templates and fields. This has saved me countless hours, but the best bit is how easy it becomes for client to manage the data in a structured way. I’d love to know how this will be develop - will documents become nodes that can represent any kind of resource?

Documents become Web Resources, as in Universal Resource Locator (URL) or Universal Resource Identifier (URI). I believe this more closely represents what they are, which, as you say, are "nodes" representing any kind of internet request/response.

You will be able to provide MODx Core Extensions to customize and extend the behavior and interfaces for Resources. A Core Extension can consist of extended core PHP classes, manager interfaces, and/or any other kind of data or file artifact that can be packaged, distributed, and installed into any MODx deployment. The core comes with two modResource class derivatives that represent the current Document and Weblink concepts in the legacy MODx paradigm: modDocument and modWebLink. I will also be providing a modSymLink class that will provide a way to forward requests to other documents (i.e. no redirect like a Weblink would). Additional possibilities for modResource derivatives could be anything from a class representing forum posts, or a class representing a very complex data object you want to represent with a view.

Quote from: therebechips at May 16, 2008, 10:04 AM

Going on from that, it would be interesting to hear how MODx 0.97+ will fit in with the idea of being a framework for building web apps. I’ve used Codeignitor for some time and love it, but I suspect that MODx will begin to offer similar flexibility but with the advantage of an extensive and highly customisable content management suite.

My goal has been to provide a framework that provides a robust RAD platform without excluding the use of best of breed scripts or libraries as helpers to get whatever the task at hand is done in the most appropriate way. Ultimately, I want MODx to be a poor man’s enterprise application integration and "mash-up" platform, where various technologies come together in a manageable web site life-cycle management tool.

For instance, making use of Zend Framework classes, or CodeIgnitor libraries, or even other templating engines like Smarty will be not only possible in the new architecture, but will be encouraged to keep the core light, agile, and viable to as large a crowd of adopters and integrators as possible.

MODX CMS is globally known among developers for catering creative freedom and developing smart bets for the software. If you want to explore in detail about 'why MODX development is the optimal solution for business development', check out this article: https://goo.gl/tCi96Z