This is my second post evaluating applications that were nominated for Packt Publishing Open Source CMS Awards. Yesterday, I tried to evaluate DotNetNuke and I was stymied by their web site. I’ve since received advice from many in the DotNetNuke community, so I will return to evaluating it when I have finished with the rest of the nominees. Today, I’m looking at MODx.
To start, let me say that I was able to go to the MODx website and download the code fairly easily. I was asked to register, but it didn’t seem like registration was required. I then turned to their documentation for installation instructions. The instructions were what I would have expected for a PHP system and, since I’ve set up applications in a LAMP environment before, I probably could have set it up without reading the documentation. Unzip the application to a public web directory. Navigate to it with your web browser. Follow the on screen instructions (with a caveat that you will need to have a MySQL database set up for the application to use.) All of this works with no problem.
I decide to install the sample site, since I figure that this will help me with my evaluation. I then log in with my admin user and start kicking around the site. The first thing that I notice is that MODx allows you to add and edit content from the front end. This is always a nice feature that I’m surprised doesn’t show up in more CMSes. The second thing that I notice is that there appears to be only one content type which serves the dual purpose of page and blog post. This is not really problematic as additional content types might be included in add-on products. However, I am curious as to how I can upload images or other files. I decide to poke around the back end.
MODx site are made up of elements which include templates, template variables, chunks (blocks of HTML), snippets (blocks of PHP code), and plugins. Snippets can be called in chunks, template, or a document itself. Blocks can be called in a template or a document. Templates can be applied to documents. At this point, I’m beginning to understand the story of MODx. MODx allows you to build a website by assembling a collection of modular pieces that can be easily created and modified. MODx prides itself in not restricting you in any way. It’s an application framework more than a CMS. The upside of this is that you are offered a lot of flexibility. The downside is that you have to do a little bit more work to get started with MODx. This is mitigated by the fact that MODx makes development easy, but you still won’t get very much from it out of the box. For example, the only way that I have found to upload files is the file manager which lets you browse the directory structure on your server and upload files wherever you want them. This is fine, but it’s not the user-friendliest implementation. A quick look at the extras on the website reveals that there are add-on products for picture galleries that make this task easier. This seems to be what is expected if you want more than basic functionality from MODx: either find an add-on module or build one yourself.
Whether you will like MODx or not comes down to whether or not you like its flexibility. If you are intrigued by the idea of building and assembling modular web site pieces, you will probably think that MODx is pretty cool. If not, you will probably hate it. Like most applications, it lives or dies by the feature that sets it apart from the pack. For myself, I actually do think that it’s pretty cool. I would be interested in playing around with it but, right now, I’m not sure if I would use it for a web site project.
Next up, SilverStripe. Though, if their web site does not come back up before tomorrow, I may go straight to WordPress.
I, too, had my first experience with MODx yesterday. I was asked by a client to make some changes to a site whose original designer is now long gone. While I stumbled through the interface for awhile, I did finally figure out how to make the changes they wanted. The mention of chunks and snippets is a bit intimidating, however.
Since my services are more on managing the content vs creating sites, now I have to decide whether or not they should keep their site and find someone who can create new templates and add more functionality to their site with MODx, or just recommend they do a complete re-write.
That said, your post was very helpful!
If you are good at html and css, MODx is perfect for you.
It allows a great deal of flexibility.
You can within hours graft a html/css or wordpress design on to MODx.
[…] first impression of SilverStripe was similar to my first impression of MODx: out of the box functionality seems to be very limited. Again, this is not necessarily a bad […]