Posted on Monday June 12, 2006 in Work
I am in my fifth week of using MODx as a basic CMS framework for a whole bunch of jobs, and I have to say I am so pleased with it. It doesn’t have the overheads other CMSs have to do with client training and explaining the metaphor for page structure. Joomla/Mambo is the worst for that.
If you are teaching someone without a medium to advanced level of knowledge about how they are to use their new Mambo/Joomla CMS, you first have to explain to them about Sections and Categories. This is where the first confusion will arise.
A section in J/M refers to the top tier of a tree structure. This tree structure will eventually have three levels, with Sections at the first. You will have to name your Section something sensible, because you will have to refer to it later on. It will also have a title, that can be different to the name if you wish. For the purposes of this example, lets call the section “News”. You can also add an image and a description to the section.
For every Section, you can have any number of Categories. These are supposed to be sub categories of the first level items (Sections) or their child elements. A Section can have any number of categories. These categories also have names and titles. Each category can only be in one Section. Once again for this example we choose to have “Local News”, “International News” and maybe a “CMS News” category. You can add an image and a description to the category.
Finally, each Category can have any number of content items. These can be thought of as “Leaf Nodes”, or endpoints in your tree structure. These nodes actually contain the information that you want to display. So each content item in the “Local News” category will probably be a news story.
You can bypass this tree structure by using “Static Pages” which sit outside of this hierarchical system and will usually contain content that you do not wish to change very frequently, for example the privacy policy and so forth.
Now this is simple enough for anyone that works with computers and is fairly competent. It is, however, a complex thing to explain to someone who tends to become confused by computers anyway. A serious problem for clients who thought that all a CMS was going to allow them to do was “change the content themselves”.
If a client wishes to add a new page, they must first of all log into the backend, click “New Content Item” (if they can remember which one it is), select a section then a category, then write the content. If they want a link to the item to appear in the menu, they have to go to the menu manager, select the menu, click “add new menu item”, select “link to content item”, select the content item, add a name and then save. This is not a trivial task. MODx, on the other hand, works like this: Log into the backend, select “Add New Content”, add a page title and a menu title, add the text. Save. Easy as. This takes 5 minutes to show someone – teaching the Joomla metaphor takes a lot longer. Trust me. I have spent many hours after the client training has finished reminding people about the roundabout way of getting things done in Joomla.
This is where MODx is so good. Once you log in to the Manager (administration section), each block of content has an edit button. So simple, and so easy for non-web people to understand. Click, edit, save. Joomla has this edit in place feature as well but it is nowhere near as elegant.
I will add more over time.