MODX – Page 11 – The Coding Pad

Quick Fix – How to Change a Document’s Parent in MODx

This post is a response to a question by one of my readers. In the comments for the post on Introducing MODx Snippets, Ian asked:

I accidentally created a page that was at a sub-level of the first page, turning the first page into a folder. I can’t figure out how to undo my mistake.

This is an easy mistake to make, and sometime you may just need to change which docs are in which container and such. Fortunately, it’s actually pretty easy to correct and there are a couple of ways to do it, let me walk you through them. (Remember you can click on all the screenshots to see a larger view)

To start off, here is a screenshot of my document tree. I have created a document named Home, and within it is a document titled About Us.

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Building a Website with MODx for Newbies- Part 8: More Ditto

Welcome to part 8 of our series of tutorials on building a website with MODx CMS. So far we’ve looked at:

Part 1: Introduction to MODx
Part 2: Installing MODx
Part 3: Working with Templates
Part 4: Introducing Chunks
Part 5: Introducing Snippets
Part 6: Introducing Template Variables
Part 7: Introducing Ditto

As we work through these tutorials, we’re building a MODx resource site called Learn MODx. In the last installation we introduced Ditto and continued working on the Library section of our resource website. In today’s installation we’re going to continue working some more with Ditto, and learn how to template our output so that our Library page has the look we want. In the learn we will learn a little more about Ditto, its parameters, and its placeholders.

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MODx Blog Contest Drawing to an End – Less than 2 Weeks!

The MODx Blog contest is now winding down. We have already received some submissions, and we’re counting down… less than two weeks to the end. If you haven’t submitted your entry, please make sure to do so before the morning of Friday May 8th. I will close the comments section to the contest post shortly after that so that we can start the process of selecting the winners.

So make sure you get your entries in on time. I am looking forward to seeing what people are building with MODx. Remember that we are looking for more submissions from people who are new to MODx, so no matter what your knowledge level, all you need to enter is a 3 page (at least) website built on MODx and a small write-up :). There is a series of newbie tutorials on this blog to help you get started, just click onthe MODx category and get started… you have time! 🙂

Some of the prizes include copies of the MODx Web Development book and memberships to the tuts+ network.

Visit the main contest page to learn more and to submit your entry!

Building a Website with MODx for Newbies- Part 7: Introducing Ditto

Welcome to part 7 of our series of tutorials on building a website with MODx CMS. So far we’ve looked at:

Part 1: Introduction to MODx
Part 2: Installing MODx
Part 3: Working with Templates
Part 4: Introducing Chunks
Part 5: Introducing Snippets
Part 6: Introducing Template Variables

As we work through these tutorials, we’re building a MODx resource site called Learn MODx. In the last segment we introduced template variables and started to add a new section (Library) to our resource website. We created a new template to hold information about books, and created a container to hold all the pages about books. Recall that in MODx a container is simply a page that acts as a parent to other pages (children). So far our website looks pretty much the same as it did before: (you can click on the images to see a larger view)

In today’s tutorial, we’re going to continue working on our Library section. We’re going to publish the individual pages for the different books, and then make them accessible to our website visitors by creating a page that aggregates all our book pages using the Ditto snippet, and then make that page accessible to our visitors. So let’s get started:

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Gauging User Interest – MODx vs. Drupal

This post was inspired by a conversation on Twitter, where @ShaneSponagle, my buddy and MODx guru extraordinaire 🙂 asked me what my blog stats looked like with respect to interest in MODx vs. Drupal, since I blog about both platforms. What I’m going to present here is a simple, and yet not so simple answer to that question.

Some disclaimers before I start:

I’m not an expert on either platform, I just share what I know and I’m learning
I’m not an expert at statistics or interpreting them
I’m not making any statements about which CMS is “better” or “more popular” than the other
In the grand scheme of things, I’m a small fish and this blog is just a small portion of the web, and so I don’t pretend to represent any global trends

That said, I think there’s some moderately good basis for comparison for three simple reasons:

I am working concurrently on two tutorial sets, one for Drupal and one for MODx
They are both aimed at complete newbies, so the audience is comparable
A lot of my top hits and searched are on posts in either tutorial series, with the exception of two other posts (one on Fedora and the other on splitting CSV files).

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