ModX Templating is fun
The project I’m just wrapping up is a ModX template, though I can’t let you peek yet since the client hasn’t done his part to make it ready for prime time.
ModX is a Content Management System that is great for membership sites or sites that are expected to grow very large, in excess of 500 webpages. Though it’s a learning curve getting this pup set up to anticipate future needs, the user interface is pretty easy. What’s fun is that if you’re logged in to admin and access the site from the front end, you can edit the pages as you see them, right from the webpage itself, using the quickedit feature. Makes for less mistakes when you’re looking on the screen at the page you’re actually editing in the full featured editor popup window. Edits go live at the click of a button and you can see what you did. Very cool.
The ModX CMS allows for xhtml/css templating, which is why I like it. I can pretty much make this one do anything I want it to, within reason. The only caveat being that if the site grows very large the menu systems as they’re written might need changing in future to keep layouts from breaking. Hard to anticipate that. The “snippets” and “chunks” thing is tricky to get your head around but does allow for a fairly large extension of functionality in many different ways. I just hope ModX moves the snippet library onto their own site soon, rather than depending on the etomite site, where it will probably be put behind password protection next, judging by past behavior (modX is an Etomite fork.)
My only objection to this system as it stands is that, like all other CMS systems, it doesn’t have safeguards in place to keep the client from inadvertently screwing up the code. Though you can choose either the fckeditor or tinymce, neither one automatically cleans up client code oopses. There appear to be ways to implement htmltidy and other fixes but the client would have to want to use the fix and then push the button to do it. Extra steps. I doubt highly most clients will take them.
I hope that in future this is fixed. I’d love to save my clients from themselves, especially since, when a client makes an oops, it always seems to be blamed on me . . .
**UPDATE** I did manage to “massage” the tinymce editor and do just a bit of client education and the ModX installation I have on LanguageLearner.com is now producing reasonably clean code. I found that stressing the importance of clean code so that the site would not get “broken” did the trick.
