Add your Newbie FAQs here, please...

Okay, fellows. Ryan has (quite unexpectedly) asked me to start making a list of Frequently Asked [Support] Questions (FAQs) coming from newbie users of MODx. The simple reason is to try to alleviate some of the support burden from the MODx dev team by answering some of the most common support questions once and for all. Therefore I ask:

@All seasoned MODx'ers:
As far as your experience goes, what are the support questions you feel keep coming over and over again?

@All newbies:
What are the questions you, as new to MODx, feel doesn't get answered in the FAQ section or in the Documentation?

If you feel you somehow need to explain the reasoning behind the question, please feel free to do so!

Shoot away, folks!

*************************

List of suggested Newbie FAQs:

• Q: How do I [insert your problem] with DropMenu?
• Q: Can MODx run on [insert your Server OS]?
• Q: How do I style the contact form or the web signup and web login boxes?
• ...

Thank you for the thread. I'm very new to Modx and CMS in general so I may be newbier than most. These are some of the questions I'm coming up with as I'm starting to work with Modx:

Questions:
----------
1) It looks like more than any other CMS I've researched and tried out that Modx is meant as a true framework where it is expected for the developer to write front end CSS/HTML code. Is it possible to create a Modx website without doing any programming?
2) Where/how do most of the experienced Modx users start a website. Meaning do you build the framework of the pages/elements/resources and then add the presentation layer in with the templates/html/css?
3) I'm not sure I'm following the basics of where the page specific text/content is organized in the directory structure or in the manager compared to the HTML/CSS styling.
4) Is it typical for there to be a template for each web page? It looks like to me that the template has the HTML/CSS code and if the layout is going to be different on each page, you would have a template for each.
5) Is there anywhere to download and open a prebuilt Modx website to see how things are organized (HTML, PHP, CSS, etc) and what snippets/chunks/TV's are used and where?


Again, thanks for the open arms . I'm excited about learning everything, just getting hung up at the starting line.


Quote from: thesolhere at Feb 12, 2013, 09:29 AM

Okay, fellows. Ryan has (quite unexpectedly) asked me to start making a list of Frequently Asked [Support] Questions (FAQs) coming from newbie users of MODx. The simple reason is to try to alleviate some of the support burden from the MODx dev team by answering some of the most common support questions once and for all. Therefore I ask:

@All seasoned MODx'ers:
As far as your experience goes, what are the support questions you feel keep coming over and over again?

@All newbies:
What are the questions you, as new to MODx, feel doesn't get answered in the FAQ section or in the Documentation?

If you feel you somehow need to explain the reasoning behind the question, please feel free to do so!

Shoot away, folks!

*************************

List of suggested Newbie FAQs:

• Q: How do I [insert your problem] with DropMenu?
• Q: Can MODx run on [insert your Server OS]?
• Q: How do I style the contact form or the web signup and web login boxes?
• ...

This series may be a good start for complete beginners:
http://codingpad.maryspad.com/2011/01/23/modx-revolution-for-complete-beginners-part-4-working-with-templates/

There's 3 years posts for revo, 5 years posts for evo and 6 years posts for discussions. Searching before asking does help.

I did quite a bit of reading on the forums and discussions and many online searches, just had trouble pulling it all together that made sense or I wouldn't have posted in the first place.

Bruno....that link is exactly what I needed. Thank you. I stumbled across the website in my searches but the beginner tutorials posted on the first pages didn't show this on. This is perfect. Thanks again.

one thing the FAQ needs is cross referencing and 'in context' BASIC examples.

I've been stumbling around them for a few weeks now and time and again i find myself having to stop what i'm trying to do to decipher the guide's language as without context meaning is hard to grasp.

quite a lot is taken for granted by the authors of the guides as far as user knowledge goes and what may be a simple task to an experienced user can take a long time to accomplish because of it.

if a user has to do A then B then C to get something to work the guide/faq will often be great on A & B then tell you you have to do C without giving you either instructions or a link to some on how to go about it and without the vocabulary a new user can often find searching the forums for answers a daunting task.

I think one thing that would be a great addition is a package selection tool and an experience rating system.

kinda thinking this out as i type so forgive me for any half formed thoughts but the toolkit would work on a check box system, the user would select the type of features they want to add to their site - blog, news, shop, members area whatever and the tool would recommend the best fit package solutions, produce a list guides/tutorials and forum sections/ threads relevant to each package.

if install order isn't an issue you could even rank the tasks by difficulty and set the easiest ones as first on the 'to do' list so that the new user learns as they progress through the list, leave the more complex stuff until last and you will reduce support requests simply because by the time they reach the hard part they will have a better working knowledge.

I'm definitely under the category of "Newbie". I maintain our church's website, and about 3 years ago we hired a consultant to install MODx on our server. It's worked fine until several months ago when something started inserting "//////" into anything we entered that included quotes or apostrophes. I saw some old posts that dealt with "Magic Quotes" that seemed to match our problem, but I'm not sure how that fits into my situation (given the age of the posts and the fact that this problem started occurring recently). Efforts to reach the consultant have been difficult, so I'm poking around trying to get some info on my own. One thing I did learn from our server provider is that we were recently moved to a new server (with an updated PHP), and this move roughly corresponds to the time where the problem started. The server provider tech support suggested that our version of MODx is probably incompatible with the newer PHP and that we need to update MODx. Our PHP version is 5.3.24, and the database is 5.0.96- community.

Anyway- for now- simple question: We're running "MODx 1.0.3 Rev 6653" How old is this? Is it known to be incompatible with PHP v 5.2.24? Can it be updated, and what should we update to? I've looked around the forums trying to understand the history of MODx versions. It seems that there are two products: "Evolution" and "Revolution", but I don't see a revision path that seems to match what we have.

Any comments / suggestions would be appreciated.

I think you have this problem:

when I add a php.ini file with magic_quotes_gpc = Off into the absolute root it's fixed again.
test with a blank chunk and add "", if these will get \\\\" something is still wrong.

Dear community,

I've got a question for you guys. I currently got a website setup for a customer who wanted a blog on his website. After the website was done he wondered how people were being told that there has been a new blogpost or event marked there. I already offered RSS feeds but he didn't seem to like that idea. Is there any way to use Wayfinder or getResources or something to achieve this? I'm using getPage and getResources for my blog.

Cheers, Marco

http://forums.modx.com/thread/84726/something-to-show-newest-blog-items#dis-post-467286

Hello All,

I have a question and I am new to MODx so here it goes. I have a site that was developed for a client. In the site there are multiple links to download PDFs (assets/downloads/pdfs) across a wide range of pages. The client wants to set it up so when a user clicks to download the PDF he/she gets a simple form with a login, password, and email. After the form is completed they will be redirected to the PDF they were going after. Or at the very least be redirected back to the page they were on and allowed to then download the file. What is the best way to go about this? I have searched around and have seen a couple answers but have not found anything definitive. I would really like to implement one login page that would work dynamically for all the PDFs in the site.

I only want the user to have to fill out the form once, and then from there they can download as many files as they want. Any help would be greatly appreciated. THANKS!