Playing With ModX

In my new job I inherited three different content management systems. I know WordPress and familiar with Drupal, but ModX is fairly new to me. The main site is running on ModX, which set up three years ago by my predecessor’s predecessor. I had done some reading on ModX as well playing around a bit with the current site, which runs on the older version of ModX.

I am quite impressed with ModX’s flexibility, template design in particular. Like Drupal and WordPress, ModX is based on PHP and MySQL. Unlike Drupal, ModX is very friendly for designer. A designer can create the entire static HTML site and only need to add in ModX snippets where dynamic contents required. The snippets are ModX’s own code so you can’t mix in HTML with PHP; therefore, the HTML codes could be quite clean and minimal.

With the school’s particular site, however, the previous’s previous developer customized the core and database to create functions that ModX didn’t have at the time. The downside is that upgrading ModX will be a huge challange.