MODx Layout and Design DIscussion/Feedback

[Guest]

Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?

1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Timmer]

Hello,

This is part question and part discussion from those more familiar with CMS management and MODx experience. (Hopefully I am posting this in the correct forum)

A little background to my question/discussion:
I have a little website for a hobby project of mine. Currently, I set it up with Joomla 1.5, having compared it to Drupal and a couple others and finding it easiest to use. I mainly have a blog and some article postings and link it to an external wiki and forum systems (I'm okay without a bridge since the CMS part requires no logging in by users). While I like many aspects of Joomla, one thing that I am running up against is that if you want to customize modules and pages, it becomes very near impossible. I then went looking for other CMSs and came across this one and, after some learning curve, have began to really like it and am working on moving my site over to it.

And now to my question....
One thing that drew me to Joomla was its Article Manager and way of separating articles/content from the layout. MODx doesn't seem to have this built-in as you just have a tree of 'pages', some are dynamically updated from other pages while others just hold content. This feels a bit weird and messy to me.

I was thinking of using the tree and dividing it between Content pages and Layout pages, something like:

Code:

Website
+ Content
   + Articles
      - Welcome
      - About my project
      - etc...
   + Blog
      - Blog posts....
+ Layout
   - Home
   - About
   - Contact
   - Blog
+ Special Pages
   - 404, error, etc...

... and then, obviously, filling in the Layout pages with the appropriate Content via Ditto or whatever chunks/snippets. (Ie, Wayfinder would pout to the Layout.id instead of 0, etc).

I was wondering, for people with more experience, do you do something similar? Do you just stick with a mixed structure? What are the pros/cons and what systems do people find helpful for layout out your site on the back-end?

Thanks for your feedback!

[bunk58]

I, and I think many others do pretty much as you have suggested, according to the complexity of the site.
Create containers for different sections/elements of the site.
It keeps it neat and tidy, some of the containers hardly ever get opened whereas others are in a state of continual updating.
You can then restrict who has access to them if you have other admins managing the site.
It's completely up to you how it's organised.
If you change your mind later, you can move docs from one container to another.

[dev_cw]

I go fo a straight forward approach where the doc tree reflects the site structure as closely as possible:

+ Home
+ About
+ Blog
    - article
    - article
    - ...
+ News
    - article
    - article
    - article
+ Contact
+ 404 Error page
+ Rss Feed

This will change to accommodate special situations, but overall this is what I go for. This seems to work well for some sites or sites with fewer sections, however, for sites with many sections it may be easier to do as you suggest.

[cbaone]

I would agree with dev_cw here. When it comes to editing or handing over a site to a new "webmaster" then having the tree structure follow the structure of the site is very helpful. It just seems to make more sense and everything can be found following the navigation of the site. I guess it depends on the complexity, but even most large sites with many different directories can follow this same logic. FWIW, I am currently finishing up a site that already has almost 900+ pages of content and the site structure is working great.

[Timmer]

I can see how it would be easier to make your way through at first but doesn't that go against the basic design principle of separating content from presentation?

[sottwell]

The document tree is content. Presentation is handled by the template system. Sounds like you're confusing organization with presentation.

[cbaone]

Very well put Susan. Thanks for clarifying.

[Timmer]

The document tree is content. Presentation is handled by the template system. Sounds like you're confusing organization with presentation.

Sounds like I am. So does it make sense to change the wording? What about mixing content and organization?

[bunk58]

Timmer, That's what I thought you were getting at.

[Dr. Scotty Delicious]

The document tree is content. Presentation is handled by the template system. Sounds like you're confusing organization with presentation.

Sounds like I am. So does it make sense to change the wording? What about mixing content and organization?

I think you are confusing a lot of ideas here. When content, presentation, and behavior are discussed in software development, it is most often in the context of MVC (Model, View, Controller), where the "Model" parts of the application manage and represent data (for instance database abstraction), the View is the presentation. This could mean your html template and CSS, or any aspect a user interacts with, like a form and how it is laid out. The Controller is the part of the application that takes input from the view (http requests, clicks, submissions) and interprets what action to take and which Model(s) to request data from, and the other way, takes data from the Model and hands it to the View for rendering.

Orgainization, directory structure, and document hierarchy are for the most part unrelated to presentation and/or content.

If I am following correctly, it sounds like you got used to the way it was done in Joomla and you have noticed that MODx is different. You are correct. MODx does display content differently in that it is much more flexible than Joomla. You can make much more than just news articles, pages, and blog entries.

Most of us who use MODx on a regular basis will be happy to tell you that we think the document hierarchy as a tree is a better system, but that comes down to our opinion. It is a bit of a mental leap to get over, but I am sure that once you do, it will give you a whole new perspective on how flexible this system really is.

I say this as a compliment to MODx...  It is not Joomla!

-sD-
Dr. Scotty Delicious, DFPA.

[ChuckTrukk]

I have been migrating toward something similar to what you have up there. Mine is based on the menu structure though.

Code:

Website
+ Menu Root
   + Home
       - Home Content
       - Another document in Home
   + About
   + Contact
       - Thank you Page
   + Blog
       - Article One
       - Article Two
       - Article Three
+ Site (hidden pages they'll probably never edit. So I hide them)
   - 404, error, etc...

I am trying to pry the clients from being able to mess up the structure. Use Ditto or template for everything. Create TV's for individual images or image galleries, extra info. So they fill in the blanks and I create the template for where it goes. If there's only one 'section' on a page, I wont do a sub-page. I am toying however with creating a [*content_template*] TV for those (hidden to regular users, in another tab with managermanager) where they fill in the TV's for the page and I template it with [*content_template*] (why use ditto for just one page).

Well that was run together.

Well the Pirate just posted while I was writing this. I'll try to explain.

- Use a TV for each individual section/block/image
   +WHEN: when the layout is not simple enough it could be done in Wordpress
   +Xtra: To make images really easy for a client, use a BINDING to call a directory listing snippet that only returns images from a certain directory. (or queries database for list of users)
- Templating
   +WHEN: if multiple items using the same template, use Ditto
   +WHEN: if only that page, might as well just use a seperate TV called [*content_template*] that functions as your Ditto_Tpl_Chunk
   +Xtra: use PHx for nice if 'this' = 'that' show 'this-chunk' else 'that-chunk'

[Timmer]

I just wanted to say thanks for all the comments -- that's why I posted this!

Yes, sD, I am more used to Joomla. The Article Manager was the main reason I picked Joomla originally as I liked the separation of my articles from any layout/organization of the site itself.

While learning MODx, the examples and demos seem to have content closer tied to its layout in the website and this seemed like it could make the website fragile at first. For instance, if the site was changed around, it would also move around the content/articles pages in the tree.

But I am still learning so thought I'd see if this was not a problem in reality and how people structured their sites with more experience.

I definitely appreciate how MODx let's you manage your site however you like and it's the feature that got me moving over to it from Joomla (what, I don't want a page pointing to just one module type?)

@Pro: TVs are still the one part I don't have figured out in my head; definitely need to fix that!

[sottwell]

For the most part, the Document Tree will be primarily a basis for your menus. It also allows the organizing of your documents into groups that can be controlled by the manager access security system.

TVs are just extensions of the regular document variables ([*pagetitle*], [*longtitle*], etc). They are specific to templates, but their fields are added to each document that uses the specified template(s), and can be edited for each document, just as the "pagetitle" field can be.

Of course, this is a very simplistic description; TVs can be much more than simple values, and their input fields (what is added to the document editing page) can be set to a number of options, as well as how the output of the TV is formatted (widgets). Plus there are the bindings(@INHERIT, edit for a parent/container document and all of its children will inherit the value; @EVAL, run PHP code like a snippet; etc) to give almost unlimited flexibility.

What I've often wished is that documents were given categories (like the other elements such as snippets and chunks) and TVs could be linked to categories instead of templates. I've found myself using templates as a means of grouping certain documents into categories just for this reason, even though the templates actually are all identical.

[ChuckTrukk]

What I've often wished is that documents were given categories (like the other elements such as snippets and chunks) and TVs could be linked to categories instead of templates. I've found myself using templates as a means of grouping certain documents into categories just for this reason, even though the templates actually are all identical.

I use Templates as Categories. Usually one templateInclude file for each 'category of TVs'.

Timmer,
Check the links in my profile for some example/descriptions of TV's.