I'm in love with MODx

BACKGROUND

By day I am a .NET developer writing C# windows and web applications.    I very much enjoy the .NET space.    My professional experience with a CMS tool has been with Sitecore.  I have the certifications and scars to prove my expertise :-).    I am impressed with how Sitecore works and how it works for my company.

By night I do websites for small businesses helping them achieve a web presence with limited budgets.  Enter the open source space.

I have created sites in Joomla, Wordpress and Wild Apricot CMS tools.   I have played with Umbraco as well but most small businesses already have a hosting presence and it is on a linux host.   That closes the door to the .NET space.   No worries, I enjoy working with all technologies.

DRUPAL IS EASY, FUN, PRODUCTIVE?

I recently started working on a simple site for a client.   They had approximately 15 pages of static html to put into a CMS tool.

The layout of each page was a simple two column layout, where the width of the two columns could vary per page.      Most of the time the second column was a typical sidebar and the first column was the main content.   They also want the site to be multi-lingual and allow for member logins.   Something that most CMS tools can handle in some way.

The client had prior experience with Drupal 6.  So I made the leap into Drupal.  I started to learn Drupal.     Some initial questions came to mind;  Do I create a new theme, use an existing theme or try to sub-theme an existing theme.?

I wanted to minimize the amount of html the users have to enter (who doesn't).    How to handle the situation where my nodes needed to render differently?      The word on the web is that Drupal has a steep learning curve.   Yes it does. 

By default, Drupal provides one field for the sites body content.  This is standard practice among CMS tools, not unique to Drupal.

I didn't want users to enter both columns data into one field.     That doesn't make sense from a usability standpoint.

The standard Drupal install lets you create a block that could contain the sidebar content.   But you have to specify what pages the block lives on and you have to assign the block to a region.    That is a painful workflow to explain to a user.

I looked around and various modules exist to help with these types of situations.  But if you rely on a module you must be prepared to maintain and upgrade that module as you upgrade your Drupal installation.  Plus, modules require configuration and are not always intuitive.  

So instead of thrashing around with Drupal to get my site going I got lucky enough to find MODx.

ENTER MODX

The user infterface of MODx feels more professional to me versus Drupal.  In Drupal every time you do something a dialog pops up where you make your changes.  Edit a page,  up pops a dialog.  Change some settings, up pops a dialog.    I personally don't like the usability experience of Drupal.

With MODx you edit a page or system setting and no dialogs pop up.  Just the page containing the elements you want to modify.

I set out to create this site in MODx.   I love how modular MODx is with templates, chunks, template variables and snippets.    Everything with MODx is editable within MODx.  I didn't have to drop down to an editor to modify my template.      No templates already installed that get in my way and produce their own html like Drupal.

Using a template variable I could create a field for my second column.   The users could then edit the new field and I could place this new field on the template.    All of this from within MODx.  

I had the entire site converted over to MODx in less then six hours.   From zero to up and running in less then six hours.

I still can't figure out what is the best way to do two column layouts in Drupal!    When I asked this question on stackoverflow the Drupal terminology got in the way and I was then told to take my discussion to Drupal chat.      No one responded to me in Drupal chat.  Awesome!!

Hats off to the MODx team for a wonderful user experience coupled with a solid architecture under pinning the product.

I know thousands of people love Drupal and I respect those that created Drupal.    But for my time and effort MODx will be my tool of choice.