Anything between MODx and Joomla?

Well, it’s interresting feedback to say the least

Though I wouldn’t necessarily agree on the skill requirement (look at me, I have been in the web business for 2 years, mostly I am self taught and I don’t know if I even fit the advanced designer label and I had no hard time learning MODx), there is sure a lot to be said in favor of "click and use" system when you don’t need to go deeper. MODx has improved in this regard though, thanks to Scotty and his great Resources Wizard My guess is, in the future modules providing exactly the kind of click and use features will flourish...

Anyway, the X percent time spent learning MODx is "re-usable" and even better the more you dig into the logic, the easier you learn new MODx stuff. That’s why I think you’ll truly benefit from choosing MODx when you built new sites and/or deploy new features regularly, and need to customize (as most professionnal designer will undoubtedly do) : in this case, I can’t think of a more versatile CMF !

But sure, in other cases, the learning curve will be too much of an investment to be profitable.

Hi,

Just one question :

Do you read the Joomla15 Template tutorial ?



If you want to take control of joomla, the new Api need time.

I’m not a programmer. In fact I haven’t got a clue about programming. Yet finding Modx was the best thing that could have happened for me we design wise. I looked at all the others including Joomla and Mambo, but they didn’t come even slightly close to ModX for usability and depth of control.

Modx allows you to make your site look exactly how you want it. Unlike Joomla and Mambo where many of the sites look similar. Modx handles your data, while you handle how you want your site to look, feel, and operate. A big thing for me was that Modx allowed me to use a pure CSS layout for my site, with absolutely zero tables on output. Thats because Modx doesn’t interfere or impose itself on your site.

So IMHO Modx is the CMS of choice.

Seconded. ModX is great design wise. You can pretty much install it and forget all PHP coding, and get rumbling with CSS/JS/Flash whatever. Installing snippets is easy enough, consisting of some cut&paste and copying a few files. Should be doable for anybody but beginners.

Ofcourse some advanced functionality must be coded, but that is to be expected if you want to get creative, and for a CMF that is its pre 1.0 fase.

Ok, so I’m really late to this party, but I might be able to offer some opinions.

I am definately not a "coder", and I am still in the early process of learning PHP (don’t laugh, you started there too!).

When I first learned of MODx, all I knew about a CMS is that it had 3 letters, and managed stuff. I downloaded it, began playing around with a local copy on my laptop using XAMPP, and learned quite a lot about the admin and backend sections. The great part of using it locally to learn is you don’t mess up anyone’s site, and you can easily reinstall if you really screw things up.

The more I got into using snippets, chunks and plugins, the more I began to feel the full functionality of MODx. If I got stuck (quite often) I always read the forums, searched the forums, looked in the wiki and then asked for help. I love to tinker and figure things out myself, but sometimes a man has to ask for directions!

I have been playing with wordpress, and without extensive code hacking it is very limited to a "blog" system, but a good one at that. The nice thing about MODx is the functionality that seperates the content from the presentation. With MODx, you have full control of the layout, template, css, etc. This is not always available with other systems.

I’m still learning, or trying to learn, how to use TV’s and some other features, but the first site I created with MODx is here:

http://www.unionky911.org

I used Ditto, MaxiGallery, and several other snippets to create it. As always, if you don’t like the code for a particular snippet or plugin, you can always hack the template code that comes with it, and create your own. I had to do that because I like to create my sites as XHTML strict compliance, and a couple of the items were missing a few things to get there.

Should you try MODx? Sure, why not? It’s free, plenty of support, and you can learn something out of it... go for it!

And, last but not least, don’t forget you can always ask for help!

Since this thread was rekindled I’d like to point out a fact that far too many people miss and should be the very first thing a user does when approaching MODx: Install the Default Database.

To be honest I have been using MODx for over a year with out ever doing an install with the default data and when I did it made a whole bunch of things click.

I can’t stress this enough that this should be in every stitch of documentation on learning MODx. Do a Default Install First and take a look at the templates, snippet calls, chunks and more!

Dear ejcross and smashingred,

Thank you very much for your comments.

I am just starting to install MODX (I am really busy at the moment, so I just installed it two weeks ago, and that’s all). I guess that, as ejcross says, at the beginning I will have to ask/look for many questions/answers at the forum.

The piece of advice smashingred has given us is very useful to me. I love that kind of "tips".


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Vicent