Another look at ModX

I’m working on a CSS-debugging article, but in the meantime I thought I’d share a more sober look at the ModX CMS.

I took a chance and used it to put together a static site AND a blog site for a client who needed both. I wanted a consistent login and editing interface, so I needed to try to stretch whatever I used in both directions.

ModX held up pretty well. It takes a lot of configuration if you start from scratch, and I kind of miss editing straight PHP. That’s where ModX is both beautiful and a pain: It puts a layer of pretty interface between the code and the front end that a platform like Wordpress doesn’t really have. It’s not as easily hackable. That’s not to say it’s not extensible, because it really can do anything I want it to. It’s plugin architecture is grand. Which leads me to discuss its plugins.

At first glance the boards were full of great looking plugins. However, quite a few of them are poorly coded and took more hacking than it was worth to make them work. And everything is dependent on a web of “snippets”, “chunks” and “template variables” which are enough to make a first-timer’s head spin. Once you get the hang of it and understand the flow, it’s relatively ingenious. Could use some refining, but a decent system.

Overall I’m still impressed with ModX. I think it will really shine from the client side when they realize they don’t even have to log into a back end editor to post or edit content. Everything can be handled from the front side, and with finesse. From a developer’s standpoint it’s a little less of a goldmine than I’d hoped, but I was easily able to create valid pages and structure my templates. Did I mention it has an awesome templating system?