Joomla Fails; MODx Makes Me Happy
I’ve just spent the majority of my weekend trying to install and learn about Joomla CMS, only to be disheartened when I came to learn how pitifully it supports web standards and Web 2.0 style app development. By the sizes of its developer and user communities (aka the “Joomlasphere”), and the near-fanatical loyalty and enthusiasm I detected as I visited Joomla-related sites, I assumed Joomla would have long been tweaked to rock out with things like CSS layout and integration of some of the new-fangled javascript dhtml/ajax/animation libraries. Not so, at least not without undue hacking and headaches. Read this and weep (look under the “Mambo” entry, as Joomla is a branch of Mambo.) I did, after successfully installing Joomla and spending about 10 hours this weekend reading documentation, installing extensions, and configuring the bastard.
After looking at the PHP code of the main Joomla content component, and seeing how riddled it was with tables, and realizing how inextricable tables were from its core, I proceeded to search for another CMS. This time I was going for something that was built to support web standards and Web 2.0. A quick Google search landed me at the MODx site. Wow! It seemed too good to be true. From their website:
“MODx is 100% buzzword compliant, and makes child’s play of building content managed sites with validating, accessible CSS layouts—hence Ajax CMS. It empowers its users to build engaging “Web 2.0″ sites today, with its pre-integrated Scriptaculous and Prototype libraries. If you’re a CSS designer or Ajax aficionado, this is the CMS for you; and if you like what you see today, you’ll love what’s coming.”
MODx is written in PHP—support requirements are minimal enough for it to work on the UVa unix web cluster—it’s open-source, it’s free, and it looks remarkably well organized. I successfully installed it in the twilight hours yesterday, and have yet to really take it for a test drive. When I do, I’ll post my impressions and/or battle stories. One quick note: if you install it on the UVa web cluster you’ll want to rename some of the files to have .suphp extensions and put a little rewrite hack in an .htaccess file in your root. I’ll post specific instructions for this in the next few days.
A cautionary note regarding cluster installation: this particular CMS and many others like it require MySQL 4.1.x or above to run. U.Va.’s public MySQL server is running 3.23, so you might need to look elsewhere to find a compatible host.
Check out the demo for MODx on opensourcecms.com.
I realized that, but it seems to be working. Oh well, so much for requirements.
If you’re willing to play a little more, there’s another CMS built on Ruby on Rails called Radiant CMS. Looks like its designed for managing small group projects and the like; probably good for development teams. There’s also a live demo.
How many BeerTech’s was I telling you all about MODX.
0.95 is supposed to be a big release as the manager interface is supposed to be greatly improved. The overall goal for 1.0 is to strip all of the etomite legacy, and all content classes will basically be built out of Template Variables allowing you to manage any content in MODX. Currently some content variables are still hard coded in the base article class.
For small to medium sites I still think Textpattern is the easiest to get what I want out of it.
Patrick, perhaps the beer affected my memory
If I was present when you mentioned ModX, then my feeble brain failed to preserve your nugget of wisdom. Thanks for trying to get the word out, though, and for being ahead of the pack.
Nice article ! I really is about why Textpattern, CMS Made Simple or MODx were built for in the first place : tag based templating, clean content/presentation separation, to the point of controlling the output of extensions via micro-templates and variable placeholders
It changed my life, completely dropped old school CMS from then on…
About Radiant : a clean and very interresting “Lite CMS”, but nowhere near MODx power IMHO, not even (as yet) as powerful as Textpattern. And talking about requirements, RoR is not the most common server setup you can encounter
Did you ever get the .suphp and .htaccess hack instructions ready?
I’m surprised that you were disappointed after evaluating different CMS apps,
I found that no CMS app will have all the things you want without hacks and
addons. I felt the same way you did but atleast Joomla has tons of free third
party plugins, components, and mambots. Most of the things you talk about that
lack in features were easily installed within minutes with third party apps
which can easily be found on Joomlas website free for download. You can check
out my site Vodawi
As a fulltime Joomla developer I concur with most of the orig analysis. The nested tables suck.
Joomla 1.5 eliminates most of these complaints. Once all third-party addons are updated for it this will be arguably the best CMS on the net. It is certainly true as Yum points out that if you cant find what u want in the 3000+addons wait a year, someone will give u three alternatives. Or build it; components are easy to write.
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It is one of those things huh? I tried Joomla too and got disappointed. Radiant CMS works for me.
thank you for articles
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