Tag: CMS

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.

Continue reading “Building a Website with MODx for Newbies- Part 8: More Ditto”

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)

tut5modxcms81

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:

Continue reading “Building a Website with MODx for Newbies- Part 7: Introducing Ditto”

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:

  1. I’m not an expert on either platform, I just share what I know and I’m learning
  2. I’m not an expert at statistics or interpreting them
  3. I’m not making any statements about which CMS is “better” or “more popular” than the other
  4. 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:

  1. I am working concurrently on two tutorial sets, one for Drupal and one for MODx
  2. They are both aimed at complete newbies, so the audience is comparable
  3. 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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Where to find MODx Help? – MODx Resources and Tutorials on the Web

Now that the MODx blog contest is underway, it occurred to me that it may be good to start a centralized list of MODx resources on the web.  This list is by no means complete or exhaustive, since more and more resources pop up every day.  So I hope to continue adding to and growing it.

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Building a Website with MODx for Newbies – Part 5: Introducing Snippets

Welcome to part 5 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

As we work through these tutorials, we’re building a MODx resource site called Learn MODx.  In the last installment we introduced chunks and learned how to use them to clean our template and make it more manageable.  So far our website looks like this:  (you can click on the images to see a larger view)

tut4modxcms7

Today, we’re going to introduce snippets and learn how to use them to add functionality to our website using one simple example.  At this point in our tutorial, if you’ve been following along, our website navigation is simply cosmetic and the links don’t really lead anywhere.  We’re going to use a snippet to rectify that and make our site navigable from the horizontal menu links.

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