In case you are wondering why we are embarking on our quest to learn the ins and outs of MODx CMS here at Pleth, I figured I would shed a little light on the subject for you.
In the past we have used a few different CMS applications for our clients projects. Our first venture into the CMS world was with my good friend Chris Leed’s project, www.contentseed.com, which is an inline cms written in php and also available in asp if I am not mistaken. It’s a very simple to use CMS that doesn’t take a whole lot of client training. With that being said, Content Seed is primarily suited for smaller projects in my opinion and not really for larger sites that consist of a few hundred "heavy" pages. I prefer to use Content Seed on sites that have like 10 or 15 editable pages at the most, this allows the end-user the ability to have total control over their site content without having to learn a more extensive system.
Our second venture down the CMS road to heartache came with interspire’s Webedit product. This product looked very promising at first but later we would learn that it had it’s quirks and wasn’t able to stand up to rigorous editing. The editor that’s built into Webedit would even go as far as to strip away tags in the code and totally delete page content when the end-user would go in to make a routine edit. Our frustrations grew even more when time after time the support team at Interspire was unable to help us resolve the issue. Not that they didn’t try, I have had several really intense support tickets with them and they tried really hard to get the issue resolved but were unable. I add this to my review of the product because I don’t want anyone who is considering an Interspire product to get the wrong idea, these guys do some great work and also support their stuff very well, we just seemed to be the exception of the rule. I also want to state for the record that I have a few clients that are still running the webedit product and have never had a moments problem with it.
ModX is a solution that Greg happened upon and he and I have both taken a liking it to it real quick. We have it running on a few of our larger "enterprise" level websites and have been amazed at how "stable" it has been. Our support time with the clients that are running it has been cut down dramatically and we feel pretty good about bringing it to the table on future developments now as a result!
Just a little more information about MODx, it was voted as the "Most Promising Open Source CMS" of 2007 at the CMS Awards. That’s saying a lot, there are a ton of open source CMS applications out there… Here’s a blog entry detailing their CMS Award Win…
MODx Content Management System | MODx, the Most Promising Open Source Content Management System
Questions or Comments?