site: http://www.skunkwrkz.net

template: Core 3 Network from Themeforest, the reason why I used it was it looked pretty nice and I wanted to see if I can modify a regular HTML template to work with MODx.

Snippets used: Ditto for the portfolio part, wayfinder for the menu’s and I used FeedX to pull in my twitter feed.

When building the site, I used mostly Mary’s tutorials and the FeedX thread in the MODx forums.

One of the interesting things I learned about while building the site was how easy it was to being able to take a normal HTML template and be able to use it within MODx without too much fuss. I also really liked how things are broken down to chucks and snippets…very cool.

One tip I have is try and abstract you content into chunks. It just makes easier to shuffle it around when working with templates

2.) Template: used a template I helped a young lady create for her “mentor required” High School Senior project.

3.) Snippets used: Wayfinder, WebLogin

4.) Useful resources: The Coding Pad tutorials! and most definitely “The (almost Complete Guide to Creating Menus in MODx Uisng Wayfinder,” I also used the book “MODx Web Development”

5.) Something I learned about MODx during site development: Well considering that I’m just starting out, everything I did was something I learned. I have no doubt that the coolest things are yet to come. For now I’m just trying to wrap my mind around how the basics work. Everything I can think of are questions not solutions:-) Following along in the book “MODx Web Development” I set up the WebLogin snippet and guest user so that a “guest” could login and create a blog post. Though the post is created it’s not published and ends up with the “only-for-friends” access permissions. If you care to login even though it doesn’t work quite right the login info is – un:guest pw:123456

6.) Cool tip: Not sure what to say here, too much of a noobie to have discovered something others would find cool. For me the cool thing about MODx is that I don’t have to find the right plugin to make things work. I can write the code or use a library I’m used to, like jquery, and integrate that directly into MODx. I can’t wait to get the basics down so I can move on to the really creative stuff.

Thanks for the tutorials and the contest, they’ve been a good learning experience for me.

Jules

I built this site for my wife so it was a bit of a labor of love. Crafting is the order of the day here and the site acts as a showcase for all her brilliant stitched and stuffed creations and also includes a blog where she writes about her progress.

I used a wide range of snippets for this site including Ditto, Reflect, Jot and AjaxSearch.

MODx is an incredible CMS but the learning curve can be a bit daunting if you’re not sure where to look where you encounter a problem. One resource that never lets me down is the MODx community and in particular the forum. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had a sudden eureka moment after doing a search on forum and the willingness of people to reply to a post if you have a problem or need something clarified is amazing.

What did I learn from building this site? Well I basically learned how to built a blog. I’ve built a few sites using MODx before but these were fairly standard corporate sites so integrating things like comments and tags was definitely something new for me.

Tip – if building a lot of MODx websites I like to get all the basic stuff like contact pages, search results, RSS, site maps and snippets set up as quickly as possible. One way of doing this is by having an SQL database on your local machine that contains all this information and then import it via phpMyadmin into your new empty database. It’s a real time saver.

http://www.specialtymailers.com

thanx again
butchman

CMS: Modx 9.6.3 (of course)
Template: bluebusiness (modified head graphic)
Snippets: Ditto, Jot, Newspublisher, Reflect, bolform – a homegrown snippett, Wayfinder, Weblogin etc….

If you visit the site it should become painfully clear that I am no web guru, although, with modx and a decent template my boss can’t tell. Which really says more about Modx than my meager capabilities

I also have to say that this site is a work in progress. Since content is being added as we speak. Which brings up one of the many great things about modx ,which is, the ease with which the site administrator can connect users and groups to documents to completely control how the site is presented to the outside world. This is how I sold modx to my boss .eg guests can’t see customer stuff and customers can’t see employee stuff. He thinks this is the greatest thing since sliced bread – that and the price.

Anyway have a look…

for customer level access:

login: codepad
pass: codepad

… and let me know what you think.

thanx
butchman

Thank you for your submission and your write up. I like the verde template a lot too! There’s an amazing number of cool free templates out there to play with.

Thanks once again for getting your submission in, and Good luck!

mary

Thanks for your encouragement. I submitted my site, warts and all (myxzg.com).

Ian