MODx 2.2.4-pl

I'm lovin' it

Modx is just superb. It's easy to set up a new website and you can tweak really everything.
Very designer friendly.

Best CMS for a Web Designer, features:
*Set-up takes about 25 minutes
*Learn Modx in less then 72 hours
*Great Support Team/Forum
*Good documentation
*A new and fresh CMS with lot's of features!

-FireDart

Okay, MODx is great, and I have been enjoying it all this while, but when I needed to setup a simple blog with a few features like reviews, it failed me. and no one on the forums seemed interested in my own post, even though the forum has a lot of active users. It seemed I had to write the code myself if I wanted to add more functionality.

Don't get me wrong, I love MODx and I'm not trying to make it look bad. It is the most flexible CMS I have used, design-wise. You can convert any of your existing designs to MODx perfectly.
The only problem I have with it is the lack of modules or snippets. A full-featured blog addon would be nice, and a forum. I think the developers need to look into that area more, because not many people have the time to start writing PHP scripts for every little thing.
WordPress is beautiful and can even be used as a CMS because of the number of plugins and its extensibility.

sorry, I made mistake - only MODx! JAWS templating system seems easy until you open style.css file... so MODx should be now most promising cms system, I do not understand why it's been omitted in last year OS CMS Awards ranking...

modx and jaws - this is the pure future of CMS systems ... both are amazing... every CSS XHTML template can be introduced in both easly... congratulations! Good Job!

@mark:

It's true you can define "roles" for an administrator user group, but it is not true that, for example, it grants "delete" rights on all documents to this user group. You can restrain a user groups to a "document group". There's 2 levels of access to each document group: "user(=admin)" and "web user". The trick is to put all document within a default document group, and to match it with the "uber-administrator user groups". If you want a low privilege administrator group to have editing access to some documents, create a document group for these, and give access to it to these users. Since this document group is not matched with a "web user group", it remains "public" for anyone surfing on your site. There's a tutorial on it on modxcms.com, but you might have to damage your brain on it (as I obviously did) to get it working

Look around and do some testing, it can be done !

Great cms, the only one, at the time (in fact I'm not aware of any other), that let me migrate all my templates and css without modification. Since then, I modified my templates a little to get the benefits of some nice features of modx (template variables, placeholders, etc). Added some css classes for some pluggin and snippet.

Would love a wiki and forum plugin though... Can be painful to integrate "simple machine forum" to modx... Some php snippets don't have a separate "language" file, so it can be very painful to translate... You can end with bits of css all over the place, as not all contributors have the same way of integrating it in their contributed code. I think it could have better documentation, mostly have to rely on forum. Can't complain for what I got, though !

I have been searching for an intuitive but powerful CMS for a while. I have used Drupal and found it daunting. So it is basically down to Joomla or Modx for me at this point. The thing that concerns me is that I am looking for certain modules-- a wiki creation engine, a myspace type engine where people can post their own pages. Joomla seemed to have both of these, though I do not know the quality of the modules. But I was not certain if Modx had something like this. Which leads to the next question. If I were to set up a dedicated wiki creation tool such as MediaWiki or DocuWiki, is this a problem to integrate its database with a CMS such as either Joomla or Modx?

MODx is very good from a designer's perspective. You can dump your own code in and voila! you have a site. No need to reverse-code someone else's template. I found this very frustrating with Drupal/joomla, etc.

I also really love the fact that you can edit pages from the front end without users having to login to the administrative section. If you need to have a non-technical person edit content on your site, this is extremely useful.

I find the administrative tools to be very intuitive and well thought out. It is easy to see/sort/access/modify all pages on the site.

MODx's templating system is fantastic. I was able to get the front-end of my site built, in good standards compliant Strict XHTML and CSS, in about the same time as it would take me to put it together on a static site.

MODx is a nice system. But it does have problems:

The back-end is frames-based and relies upon Javascript to work.

Some have said how wonderful it is that the back-end uses AJAX, etc... Yes, but it should not *depend* upon it. Visit the admin pages in a text-browser and there is literally nothing there.

As far as I can see, there is no way to customise the administration page structure so you appear to be stuck with this limitation.

So if there's any chance your site might be administered by someone who uses assistive technology, MODx is no-go.

The other problem I have with it is the User access control. The way the MODx manager user permissions work it's not possible to grant a user different rights for different document types: A user can either delete all documents or none of them, but I can't give them the ability to edit one set off documents and not another.

Close, but no cigar!

Well, i'm trying both ModX and Joomla and well, they are completley 2 different animals.

The use of on-the-fly template variable, snippet, chunk creation for ModX allows stuff to be customised easily and created from scratch from the ground up to meet specific clients needs of content management per site since it provides a bare bones framework to work with. It makes integration of XML and Flash easy to work with as well.

For Joomla, it provides so much more features packed in the box, and so customisation can be more difficult due to the fact it's much more developed with it's structure. So, you need to get into the kind of structure which Joomla prescribes, which might not work for some sites. In Joomla, you must build/install a template, set xml parameters which function like template variables...or hack into the /admnistrator/com_content/model to add more xml admin parameters for the core features of Joomla. Creation of modules in Joomla requires the same format of installation, and can be quite labourous. Micro-customisation of individual content isn't readily supported, because it's article-based structure is already developed under the Joomla core. IN some ways, Joomla can be neater in it's structured approach, but in many ways, restrictive and time-consuming to customise ('cept for changing the core, since creating/customising a template only affects the View). The fact is, Joomla already has a core which is pretty much fixed (the way articles/modules/components work). As long as your site core fits that of Joomla, (customisable moduled layout templates), than it's pretty ok to go with it, even though it's more bloated. Honestly though, I don't see why there's a need to customise the display order of modules in template container regions for some sites, since most websites have a certain fixed design as per standard, and all your clients may want is just a way to update content on the system.

So, if you need a lean open-ended site to fit a particular CMS need which you intend to build from the ground up, than ModX seems pretty good. But becareful though, since ModX does lack in features and doesn't come up with much in the box, and does have weaknesses in certain aspects of administrative options. But it sure beats Joomla in flexibly.

Haven't tried Drupal. But I heard a cross between flexiblily and having just as much features as Joomla, even though it's harder to learn.

Great CMS, with a great team!

I can describe MODx in one word... amazing!

Every time I'm learning how to do something in it I find another feature which just makes me like it more. I love how it's so organised and simple yet the most powerful CMS I've ever come across.

5/5

MODx is great! I love it! more than WP, Joomla and Drupal, is easy to customize!

MODx is fantastic! The best... People mentioned Joomla, Drupal, WP etc... I have to say... MODx is the most organised one... Great user interface... Very well structured... It is a great CMS with a great foundation... It's got a very good future... I think we are witnessing the beginning of great and fantastic... Proud to be a part of it from the beginning!!!