Archive for April, 2009

First thoughts on MODx

Posted in MODx on April 10th, 2009 by chrisgill – Be the first to comment

Well, not quite first thoughts. I’ve been aware of MODx since 2007, when I became interested in its ability to replicate a static site with relative ease. No doubt I was influenced by its winning the award for Most Promising Open Source CMS in the Packt awards 2007.

I explored the system a little, and was sufficiently impressed to hire a guy to replicate a site of mine in MODx, which he was able to do for a very modest fee – reinforcing the view that transforming a static site into a cms site was easily done. But I haven’t spend any time on the mechanics of the system since then. Until now.

The things that seems to distinguish MODx from other systems are that (like ExpressionEngine) it is extremely flexible – you could say it is more of a framework than a CMS – and that it starts from the notion of a tree structure of pages. Most commercial sites work in this way, rather than assuming that most pages form part of many-paged blogs. MODx seems to have built a solid reputation among people who make their living building commercial sites, and there are quite a few development agencies who advertise their use of MODx.

It’s disconcerting that MODx is (start of 2009) at version 0.9.6.3, but this seems to be a curious affectation of those steering the project rather than an indication that the system is not ready for use. Real Soon Now they plan to release (apparently at much the same time) v1 of the original system and a completely rewritten v2.

I now plan to get to grips with the MODx site that I had built in 2007, and to develop another in a more magazine-style layout, and see how I get on.

I’m particularly interested by the concept touched on here at sottwell.com, the site of a MODx user and supporter:

“You simply use the HTML code for the look you want, as in any flat HTML file, then replace content text and dynamic data (such as menus) with simple tags. Each document is processed to replace those tags within the HTML template with material relevant to that page as the page is requested. The advantage to the PHP programmer who wants to develop custom dynamic content is the separation of the presentation from the layout using simple tags to include the final return value of your code”

This would seem to mean that a PHP system to generate output from my ski resorts database could inject that output into a MODx page without difficulty.