Posted on Friday April 14, 2006 in Work
This week we trialled using ModX for a client website, and my first impression is definately hyped.
This CMS offers all the things that I have wanted out of other packages I have tried. We have been using Joomla for many sites recently, and I seem to spend a greater portion of my day head in hands as I run into limitations with the CMS model that Joomla uses.
The first problem with Joomla is user access control. By default, Joomla offers only “Guest”, “Registered” or “Administrator” (and some others that I won’t go into here). When it comes to a site with different requirements relating to user management, Joomla does not cut the mustard. There are small hacks that you can use (ie modifying the Joomla core source code) but when you then try to integrate another product (aMember in this case) things FALL APART.
ModX offers a much simpler and flexible use of users and groups, and at this early stage, I am very excited about it.
There is a great forum thread on the ModX website that has people listing the reasons they moved from Joomla to ModX – check this out
Templating the MODx CMS is very simple, and give a lot more flexibilty than using Joomla. Joomla has a lot of it’s formatting hard coded into the source, and unless you want to present your information in the way Joomla anticipates you do, it can be a dull chore to hack things into submission. MODx works simply and effectively. I’m sure I will rave on later about this.