Why I Use MODx
For me, finding the right CMS system to support my freelance web design and development business is anything but trivial. And yesterday, I got huge reminder of why I am contributing to this project and using it for almost every site I deploy these days.
One of the first sites worked on as a freelancer was a site that already had won an award at the SXSW Multimedia show and I was eager to bring my knowledge of enterprise portals to the growing LAMP world, and my client. At the time, I didn't know any better, and was impressed with some of the things being produced by the PostNuke group, after forking from phpNuke. So I became familiar with PostNuke and entered the world of freelance web development by converting this media rich site to the PostNuke platform. [sounds of Jason beating himself over the head with a blunt object] It wasn't real easy to do, but I had just left a corporate development culture that produced a J2EE-based portal development framework, and the development work I was doing there was a whole lot tougher than skinning a PHP page that already had some ways to define consistent templates. So, I deployed the site and everything was good for a couple years.
Then came the hackers, and upgrades, and moving sites from one server to another trying to find a reasonable, but stable hosting provider. Suddenly, the legion of PostNuke and MD-Pro sites I had deployed were unexpectedly sucking up all my time and I was unable to make a living building new sites.
Enter Etomite. When I discovered this CMS, I was instantly in love, as I had been scouring the internet for years looking for an open-source LAMP tool that could separate presentation and logic layers (or not), and provide a reasonable management layer. As I started participating in the Etomite community, and discovering the mods being produced, I of course started using them, and my excitement grew. Great extensions like being able to import a site, or duplicate documents with one click, or attach additional content areas to a template. But then, as I was refactoring my business plans around Etomite, everything changed in the Etomite community as the founders chose to banish the very mods I had been getting more and more excited about. I had no choice but to push forward with the now unsupported mods, so I contacted Ryan and Raymond, and the rest is history captured on this site and our community.
But back to my point. As the first year of the MODx project came and went, I, probably not unlike many of you in our community, started to dwell on the things I wish the product could do, instead of what it is already doing for me. That is, until I experienced the worst upgrade of my life yesterday. Spending almost 6 hours trying to upgrade my first PostNuke site to the latest version of PostNuke (sounds simple enough) brought a new sense of pride and accomplishment to what both the Etomite and MODx teams have produced. Now I'm so glad to be working on MODx and MODx sites again today that I had to share this story with everyone.
Anyway, cheers to all, and here's to the future success of MODx and everyone participating in the MODx community!
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Even if there are differences between our experience, I have tried many content and website management systems and found that more often than not you ended up "working for those systems" instead of them working for you !
I dropped Typo3, because it's too heavy, cluttered and not standard compliant. SPIP, also for being non-compliant and not expandable. Mambo, for the same reason but also because templating is so clumsy and there's no tag language or template engine. e107 : while it had a clean and easy admin, lots of good stuff for a portal system, its plugins were too buggy and generally speaking I have been tired to wait for 0.7. Drupal : I had great hopes, it's truly powerful once you get past its sometimes weird logic, but the admin is messy (just the same thing is true of Xaraya...). Bitweaver : Great hopes, modular architecture with great promises, at least a tableless portal CMS ! but community is smaller than small and bugs don't make it a viable choice for production.
Finally I discovered Textpattern : at least a system that worked my way ! Certainly the best tool I had found as far as templating and design was concerned. Great and numerous plugins and an amazing community were big pluses too. The only thing here were limited hierarchical levels (2), an admin that could be more usable and content keywords/tagging somewhat limited.
I need illimited hierarchical structure for more complex corporate websites. Corporate also means usable, user-friendly backend and frontend editing. Since for me flexibility and modularity are key, and I wouldn't adopt a CMS with a clumsy template system, I chose MODx for this very specific need because it's the only one to fit the bill
I also must say the responsiveness of the dev team, and the dynamics of this community are key to my being here... It makes me want to contribute and invest time, and ultimately : use it for actual projects.
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Yet Another Portal System