Best wishes

Thomas

The kind of functionality you’re after is possible in both MODx and Drupal, so it all comes down to what else you need your site to do and how much content you’re handling. For something like this with a user who isn’t too web savvy, I would honestly use Drupal because it wouldn’t take too much extra work. You would simply need to use CCK, Taxonomy and views, set his permissions so that things in the admin end aren’t too confusing for him, and the rest is gravy.

I can also say I would consider MODx as I don’t think it would take too much extra effort to do this in MODx Evolution either, but seeing as I’ve never done something similar, I really can’t speak directly to it. I imagine that with QuickManager for front end adding/editing you could get rolling pretty fast. All your books would be grouped in a folder or folders and you would then use Ditto to display them as you wish.

Not sure if I’ve really helped you much here, it really will depend more on what other functionality you want your site to have and your comfort level with each CMS, but honestly for this particular functionality you could use either

mary

If you don’t have time to answer this sort of question, I shall fully understand. If you do have time, I shall be grateful indeed.

I am working on creating a simple website for a small publisher. I have looked at Drupal and have also been following your Newbies tutorials for MODx Evo. (Many thanks for those – very clear. Must have been a lot of work. LOTS of thanks!) So far I prefer MODx for various reasons, but the big question is whether I can arrange for the website owner (the publisher) to be able to add new book titles from a really simple online form.

The sort of thing I have in mind for him is like this: http://www.thomasgreenwebsites.co.uk/birdandfiddle/form_image.jpg The guy isn’t websavvy and doesn’t want to be.

I’m pretty sure I can do that in Drupal using Taxonomy and the Content Creation Kit. I’m not so sure about MODx. The nearest equivalent I’ve found is PubKit, which has very poor documentation.

What would you suggest? (A note about my skills – OK on html and css, a little php but not deep.)

I hope that’s clear. Any suggestions will be welcomed.

mary

I recently changed jobs and may need to dev a CMS for them at some point. My coding background is I did Computer Science at UNI but have done more tech support until recently.

Currently my company I am working for has a custom built CMS, It does the job quite well but has been worked on by many people over the years and is no comments in code! Changing anything is horrible thus why I want to look at a rewrite in Drupal or Modx.

The main thing the site is used for is document management. We need to allow clients to search for documents based on the document category and keywords. Documents need to have summaries associated with them. Permissions need to be quite complex allowing for example one user in a group of users access to everything and another only access to documents published from a given date.
Any help you can give me on what CMS would be best to approach this in would be very appreciated.

Thanks,

James

I completely agree with you about the time investment involved in “mastering” any tool, and I should probably have mentioned that in the post, but I think if you pick a few tools to learn, each time you use each tool to accomplish a task you learn something new or advance and refine your current knowledge. And yes, it’s hard to keep up with all the advancements, but it’s worth a try for the tools you do pick. There is danger of spreading yourself too thin, so it’s definitely important to strike a balance. Because I’m an infinitely curious person, I try pretty much any tool that’s out there and pick up the basics on each, but I consistently direct my efforts at digging deeper into my chosen few.

Thanks again for the excellent feedback.

mary

Since you asked… personally I’d also agree that your clients will thank you if you take the time to learn more than one tool. However, I’d say there’s a fair time commitment to properly learn even a few systems (or perhaps I’m just a slow learner) – not to mention keeping up-to-date in what is a rapidly evolving area. I’ve been working pretty extensively with ExpressionEngine for the last 10 months. I’d say it’s taken most of that time to really get to know it as a tool; I’m still not sure I’d say I had ‘mastered’ it. Likewise I spent months with MODx before that (and now coming back for a refresher since a lot’s changed since I used it last on a live project).

Nonetheless, I’d still opt for learning more than one tool so you have a whole tool-kit at your disposal rather than a single (albeit flexible) one.

All the best…

mary