What did you use before MODx?

Wordpress and Joomla!

A few sites with each. Was tossing up using Drupal, Expression Engine or MODX. MODX got picked because of the apparent versatility and seemed to be very cutting edge in the CMS relm. Drupal sounded like a steep learning curve and that it might be a pain in the butt to do a lot of things. Expression Engine sounded very similar to MODX in application and there seemed to be trade offs as far as one doing something a little better than the other, but EE costs money for each deployment AND every add-on you use also costs money!

Wordpress has come a long way and folks are using it for all kinds of things. To me though it started as a blog type CMS and if you just want to throw up a quick and simple blog it does that well. Beyond that it's a real pain in the butt. Plus I never liked the admin area.

Joomla! was OK but seemed like you had 15 add-ons that did the same thing and non of them really did it well. Spent all my time hunting down a decent add-on or trying to customize it to work for me.

I thought I knew MODX well after implementing it a couple times. Little did I know the more I come to find out the more things I discover can be done with it. Glad to be using it and I am very very happy I finally shelled out a few bux and got BobRay's guide. Highly recommended especially to newcomers and experienced novices like me!

I used ExpressionEngine a couple of times and found it very powerful. However I also felt that it wasn't to user friendly (client side) unless you bought the added pluggins. Which then your cost really started to sky rocket. Over all I am happy with ExpressionEngine, but the cost for small or medium size projects really started hurting our profit. Some of those pluggins I thought really should be part of EE. It seems silly to me that EE doesn't incorperate some of those feature when your buying a license. Don't get me wrong I really like EE and what it can do. I still think there is a place for it within my business.

I did a lot of research and I was really torn between SilverStripe or Modx. In the end I went with Modx becuase I thought it had more of a community, and pluggins. One of my other choosing factors was the similarities with EE. When I watched some video tutorials on Youtube I was uderstanding it right away. The last couple of things is it's open source. This means I could benifit and make a profit off of small projects and not pass them by.

I am currently building two website with Modx and have been really impressed with them. The only thing I wish is if there were more video tutorials. Coding Pad has some and hey are great, but still a lot of gap in building a website. I have also been reading the tutorials there and they are again really awesome. My only thing is I'm more of a visual learner so video tutorials is a preference for me.

I hope Modx has a bright future and the popularity picks up in the United States.

I've used a lot of CMSes of various sorts. I started with remote Wikis and then decided it might be cool to develop a Wiki. I downloaded and installed MediaWiki, but found that it wasn't flexible enough for me. After a couple of months and only being 15% done with the site, I changed over to WordPress. As a content manager, it was great, but I decided that full scale web-applications were impossible with it. In other words, flexible but not powerful enough. Then I moved to Drupal, which I was not really impressed with but certainly did the job. My issue was that it behaved like every other CMS and imposed its own structure upon your design. Of course, it could be modded out, but I really hate poring through other peoples extremely convoluted source code.

At this point, I really wanted flexibility without imposition. Something that made my job easier as a software developer but allowed a content manager to do what they needed. At this point, I installed SilverStripe. It was neat, but still had some imposition. I then grabbed a hold of Magento. What really interested me about Magento was that the developers thought very much like I did, so I figured it would be a match made in heaven. After months of working through their code, just so I could have the clean markup I wanted while using their awesome plugins, I threw in the towel. That's when I found ModX. I haven't looked back since...

I'd never done more with a CMS than pick a bloody wordpress template from the long list of wordpress templates before I got roped into building a website which was already half-done on ModX. So all my experience is in the other direction, so to speak: digging deeper into wordpress, having a look at Drupal and Joomla. In each case, I think the same thing for more or less the same reasons.

The thing I think is: how the hell do people work like this?

The reasons are: you have a certain amount of power with all of them to customize your site without doing any code at all; and then once you hit that limit, you need to be a pretty well versed developer to know what you're doing at all. Wordpress is a case in point - ease of use for the casual user comes at the cost of bloated CSS, and template PHP files that do the thing I hate, hate, hate about just making PHP in notepad (or whatever) - turn into a grotesque, Ed Gein style patchwork quilt of PHP bits, HTML bits and maybe JS scripts and all. No set of comments is rigorously enough applied to make that look less like a complete mess.

MODX keeps all your PHP in one place, and all your HTML in another, and - now there's an idea - expects you to make your own CSS that does what you want it to do, and nothing more, and nothing less. It encourages the big idea behind MVC and such - keeping business logic and presentation apart - in the way you actually work. The initial 'cost of entry' in terms of code know-how is slightly higher, but this until-recently-complete-naif reckons pays off.

There must be very good reasons why Drupal and Joomla do so well (for Wordpress, I think, it's pretty obvious why). But I'd want an extremely good reason to do a site in something other than ModX at this point. Having approached all the aforementioned CMSes as an ignorant, and then a crap designer, and now a mediocre developer, only ModX has helped me advance through all that.

This is a great thread. I came to MODX from a mixed background of Wordpress and Object Oriented Flash powered by XML. Coming from Wordpress I'd quickly grown tired of using it to create websites that didn't even have blogs or comments and whose data structures in no way easily fit into Wordpress' confined Category > Post system.

Coming from XML and Flash I'd grown to love creative freedom, and being able to have 100% control over my end markup, be it XML or HTML.

I didn't start using MODX until Revolution 2.0.8 but once I wrapped my head around Templates, Template Variables, and getResources I was sold.

Wait until you get into MIGx. It adds a whole new dimension of "creative freedom" to MODx. Like this... http://rtfm.modx.com/display/ADDON/MIGXdb.Manage+Child-Resources+in+a+grid-TV+with+help+of+MIGXdb

MIGX is great. I was hesitant to start using it for a while, but once I started realizing that you should aim for only using resources only if they should have their own URL, it became very useful.

Excited to see what MODX comes up with for native ArrayTVs!

I was using so many different CMS's before MODX. I tried my hardest to work with Wordpress but for all the talk it's just not logical.
I spent some time using these as my main choices:

• Perch
• Wordpress
• Silverstripe

They were ok but none of them were as easy to template and theme as MODx. I am still getting used to MODX and have only done a few sites with it but they have been pretty seamless. As soon as MODX makes blogging, Friendly URL's, and site migration easier it will be the #1 CMS out there I think.

I've recently started using MODX following a job change. Previously I used Xindi (http://www.getxindi.com/) which is a lightweight and open source CFML content management system.

I used Etomite! ...and ModX was coming at that time and I can say it gave me freedom. ModX is the best CMS, period.