What did you use before MODx?

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[zi]

Let´s see how flexible and easy to understand it is

I am sure, you will say aloud, "It made my day" (may be life)

regards,

zi

[MadeMyDay]

I am sure, you will say aloud, "It made my day" (may be life)

...well, it already made my night

I think it´s okay for 6,5 hours discovering:

www.modxcms.de

I´ll run it in english till I know how it works with multilangual support. There are lots of things to be discovered, I´m just at the beginning. But now I need some sleep (it´s 6.45am here)

[rthrash]

Congrats on your initial explorations and early success.

[Djamoer]

Congrats to you too, it seems to me that your conversation with yourself in your first attempt really show us the real thought that you have in deterining between joomla and MODx, and that's a really cool start for us to have a user testomonial in using our MODx system. Good for our marketing strategy.

[MadeMyDay]

*infected*



www.modxcms.de

[xwisdom]

*infected*



www.modxcms.de

Hi MadeMyDay,

On your site I've noticed that you've stated that "The shipped FCK editor is not my thing"

Dont know if you're aware that FCK is optional in MODx and you can install Xhina, TinyMCE or anyother Richtext editor that your need.

[MadeMyDay]

Hi xwisdom,

I´m aware of that FCK is optional (also awailable for joomla), but I didn´t try something else yet. I´m curious if there is one that has more functions or is better to handle (less html mistakes in editing).

Greetz Marc

[Mark]

*infected*



www.modxcms.de

Just responded in the comments of your site on just about every topic. Take a look.

[davidm]

Hi xwisdom,

I´m aware of that FCK is optional (also awailable for joomla), but I didn´t try something else yet. I´m curious if there is one that has more functions or is better to handle (less html mistakes in editing).

Greetz Marc

Not wysiwyg, but as far as code compliancy is concerned, maybe Textile or Markdown will be the way to go then

[MadeMyDay]

Just responded in the comments of your site on just about every topic. Take a look.

thx for that, I´ll take a deeper look tomorrow.

Not wysiwyg, but as far as code compliancy is concerned, maybe Textile or Markdown will be the way to go then

I will look at that, too.

Thx to you two

[LeftHanded]

I used PHPKit and a lot of self-coded PHP-Pages, but with the ModX Data-Grid things a more easy ...
I tried nearly all CMS at http://www.opensourcecms.com/  some of them for weeks, others only for hours.
Hope that the documentation part will grow and lots of examples show the technical dependencies.

[BenO]

I tried:

Xoops : ok.
E107 : crap.
eZ Publish : slow as hell.

modx : promising (haven't tried it much yet)

[Duane]

I used Mambo, then (after the fork), Joomla. I worked with both for about a year, and have around 10-12 sites deployed in one or the other.

I found MODx about two months ago, and it has become...by a mile...my favorite CMS. Very flexible, very easy to use.

Duane

I just wanted to add a couple of thoughts about *why* I like this CMS so much better than Joomla. I think it might be helpful to others who are looking for some comparative things:

1.  SEF URLs.
To get the sort of SEF urls (human-readable) that MODx generates out of the box, you have to buy a $49 add-on module for Joomla/Mambo. Non-human readable urls (variables without the "?" character like: xxxxx.com/index.php/content/category/9/19/128/ are not hard to do, but MODx SEF is human readable with a click box.)

2.  Search
Without some major hacking, Joomla/Mambo search only looks at "Category" names, not content. And, getting the results parsed to a page requires using a php module called "mosMainBody();" as the container. Like all their built-in modules, it is a pain because it holds multiple functions and requires hacking to remove the unused functions.

3.  Includes are much easier in MODx
In J/M, there's no real equivalent to TVs, Chunks and Snippets. Scripts, html pieces, etc. are brought in through a php include, and any edits require either FTP or the use of an add-on editor (Joomla Xplorer).

4.  Adding Pages is much easier in MODx
There's no equivalent to the front-page menu tree in the admin, and the section/category structure forces you to create (or assign) a section and category to each new page in an interface screen that's separate from the page content input. Plus, the menu item itself is activated/published in yet *another* interface page. It takes a lot of doing (in a certain order) to add a new page -- Section has to be assigned/created *first*, because the category requires attachment to a section. Category has to be assigned/created second, because creating a menu item requires attachment to a category. Menu item creation has to be done third, because creating page content requires assignment to a menu item. It's a pain.

5.  The menuing system sucks.
With just a few output adjustments, I made DropMenu *perfectly* match the syntax of the css/list-based menu my designer set up. It takes (again) a third party add-on component to do the same thing in J/M. None of the built-in menu components can seem to replicate the designer's list menus. (Another 30 or 40 bucks).

6. Page Level Meta Tags
Unless you use J/M's built in content modules (all set up as news stories), there's simply no good way to create page-level Meta Tags. Everything ends up being site-wide. I did most of my content in custom-output modules, because I was rarely creating "news" pages, and J/M doesn't give you any way to add specific meta-tags for custom modules. So, all my J/M sites have only site-wide metas.

With MODx, I just set up editable TVs for the MetaTags, and do the page-specific tags at the same time I'm putting in page content. It reminds me to include keywords in the content, and allows me to build my keyword meta-tag list while looking at the content. Much, much, much superior.

7.  Finally, MODx is faster, in my opinion.
J/M suffers from a lot of performance problems. There are an incredible number of database queries generated by J/M...and if the SQL server isn't damn well tuned, it will turn page load to painful slowness. MODx seems not to have these page load problems -- woo hoo!

So, it's short of a Letterman top-ten list, but ought to give you a better idea of why I LOVE MODx!

[davidm]

I used Mambo, then (after the fork), Joomla. I worked with both for about a year, and have around 10-12 sites deployed in one or the other.I found MODx about two months ago, and it has become...by a mile...my favorite CMS. Very flexible, very easy to use.Duane

Well, Duane, thanks for the testimony

I hope you enjoy all those great snippets, plugins and modules that have been released recently

[mandrl]

I realize this is an old topic, but since it's still going strong, I'll add my EUR 0.02 here...

I started with Midgard (http://www.midgard-project.org/). It's a "enterprise-level" open-source CMS. Midgard uses PHP as a scripting language. It's a C program that needs it's own patched version of PHP. (This has been the case in the past, I'm not sure about the current situation.) The lack of development in UIs is one of the worst problems with Midgard. On the other hand, it can be an extremely robust and stable platform once you get it going.

I just happened to have Midgard available on the server I was hosted on so it was the natural choise for a CMS. Later I landed in web developer job at a IT company that was using Midgard. I'm by no means guru or anything, just an average PHP programmer with some background with this CMS. But because of this background, starting with MODx was easy. Midgard uses content tree structure, templates with tags, "snippets", "chucks", etc. Some features are more advanced than their MODx counterparts, but I don't want all the complexity and overhead that come with it.

I've tried to build my own sort-of CMS or "framework", but eventually got fed up playing with forms and mod_rewrite. (This is what I voted for.) Got as far as doing some sort of primitive versioning and using Text_Wiki as a input parser... I've looked at Mambo and didn't get it to do what I wanted. I tried Drupal but perhaps on wrong project that needed something else. I was briefly with etomite, but needed the path aliases. So here I am. 

MODx is my favourite CMS right now, and hopefully in future as well. It certainly looks awesome! Starting a new website is so easy and straightforward, and creating crude staging/live setup didn't seem too complicated. "It just works."