OK, I’ll take a shot.
First, we need to distinguish between MODx and MODx’s add-ons. The distinction is somewhat blurry because some add-ons are installed automatically when you install MODx. Still, MODx itself is just the underlying engine. Much of your review is actually about the add-ons because MODx itself does no menus, no web pages, no links, etc. A pure review of MODx would look at the performance, robustness, and ease of interaction with the engine. Each add-on (preferably its current version) would have to be evaluated separately.
That said, it’s not unreasonable to review the installable package as you did. The key, though, is to appreciate the tradeoffs some of us have mentioned. Any time you make something easier "out of the box" you limit its flexibility. What MODx "does" (using your preferred terminology) is provide a fairly high-performance, extremely robust, and easily extendable framework. Not only is the complete source code available, but it is written with user-extensibility in mind.
I know these sound like marketing slogans, but after you’ve done things in a few hours in MODx that you spent weeks trying to get to work reliably in another CMS, they become real. While other CMSs let you put PHP on a web page, MODx provides dozens of hooks into the core code that allow users to alter MODx’s behavior in almost infinite ways. All the elements of a MODx document are available to you (see:
http://www.modxcms.com/the-document-object.html) and here are some of the more commonly used hooks into the engine itself:
http://www.modxcms.com/api-quick-reference.html. There are many more, sadly not as well documented as they should be. What other CMS gives you an ondocumentprerender() function that you can hijack for whatever purpose you like?
Notice particularly the regClientCSS() function, which allows you to inject CSS code, generated on the fly, into the header of any page (based on conditions you evaluate at the moment) even though your code is called at the bottom of that page. Similarly, the regStartupScript() function lets you do the same with javascript code.
Note also, the eForm and eFormToDB snippets, which let you create custom forms that interface with the database and email systems in countless ways with just a few lines of code.
Yes, you can hack the core code of any open-source CSM and make it do whatever you want, but what happens when the next version comes out?. The difference with MODx is that you almost never have hack the core because the hooks you need are already there and are designed for your use.
With virtually all other CMS packages, there are many things that a user might reasonably want to do on a web site that absolutely can’t be done without hacking the core code. MODx not only lets you do those things, it lets you do so safely and, more often than not, easily.
And let’s not forget maintainability. Because of MODx’s design, your custom code is not buried somewhere in the voluminous codebase or spread across dozens of pages, it is readily visible (and editable) in the MODx Manager under the name you give it in the category you created and assigned it to.
And, I haven’t even gotten to the reason that actually attracted me to MODx in the first place. All of the above were just frosting on the cake. I wanted a site that would allow me to assign naive (not very web savvy) users, to add the actual content to the site securely and easily. I wanted aggregated news articles, automatic menus, publish and unpublish dates, multiple photo galleries, newsletter uploads, user editing of limited areas of the site, and a ubiquitous page template (with header, footer, sidebar, and menu) that the users couldn’t modify. I got it all in MODx in just a few days with a minimum of strain and frustration and an astoundingly small number of lines of code. Best of all, because of MODx’s design, I had *total* control over the site’s look and feel. To get that kind of robustness and ease of maintenance without being locked into a standard design was something I didn’t dream existed until I found MODx.
If all you want is a simple "brochure" web site that can be navigated from end to end with "previous" and "next" links, or a standard no-frills blog, MODx might not be the answer. If you want to do (there’s that word again) something truly interesting and unique on a robust, secure, and easily maintained web site, MODx might be your only choice.
Bob
MODX Staff
(Just to be clear, this is me making a light of this thread, not of Rahul.)
MODX Staff