The ModX Open Source Content Management System is really a dream to work with for web designers who wish to create a site that conforms to best coding practices while allowing a great amount of creative freedom. Unlike Mambo/Joomla, or PostNuke or any of the other open source CMS I’ve looked at, ModX allows complete xhtml/css custom templating and does not generate any table code from the core. In fact, I didn’t have to hack core for any reason. ModX has the system in place for total extensibility without worrying about things being overwritten in the next upgrade, and the library to do so is fairly impressive and growing all the time. Not only that, but with just a bit of client education ModX will continue to produce clean, search engine friendly code.

The Language Learner site was originally conceived as a possible candidate for WordPress, but when the client told me the expected scope of the site, which will be huge, and the levels and depth the navigation would need to go, I suggested he look at ModX as an alternative, since it’s better designed to handle those things.

I created a custom ModX template for this, based on a couple sites the client showed me that he liked. Then, with the client’s future needs in mind, I created the “chunks” and “snippets” that would allow him to add in the navigation and google ads and other bits and pieces in any place he wished simply by adding simple ModX “tags” into the editing text box. I’ve got to say, I’m very impressed with ModX, though the learning curve is a bit steep to make it jump through hoops.

The biggest beauty of this open source CMS application is the ease with which clients can edit pages. There’s a feature called quick edit that allows the client, who is logged into admin, to pull up a page in his browser and edit it right on the screen, simply by choosing a page section, making the changes in the popup window, and clicking the button. The changes show up live on the page right then and there, so it’s about as wysiwyg as you can get.

I look forward to building more ModX sites. If you think the ModX CMS might work for you, and you need a custom template, contact me and let’s talk.

Technorati tags- ModX CMS, ModX Custom Template, Open Source CMS, xhtml/css CMS

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 28th, 2005 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.