Digging ModX Revolution

Over the weekend I stood up wordPress, Drupal and ModX on my laptop using MAMP while sitting by mom’s hospital bed. The installation process for each system took less than five minutes. WordPress’s default theme is Twenty Eleven. Drupal’s default theme is Bartik. ModX’s default theme is blank.

ModX claims to give the designers total creative freedom. As stated on its web site:

Ever wanted complete freedom with your HTML and CSS? Tired of hacking existing systems to get your design to work the way you comp’ed it? MODx does not generate one single line of HTML – it leaves the front-end design up to you.

After reading through the documents. I am very impressed with the way ModX handling the template. The designers do indeed control all the HTML, CSS and jQuery and ModX’s placeholders handle all of the dynamic codes. This is the biggest different between ModX vs. Drupal and WordPress. With Drupal and WordPress, a designer would need a base theme to begin. Creating a customized theme from scratch for WordPress and Drupal takes tremendous amount of time and when it is time to upgrade, a designer has to also upgrade the theme. The nice thing about WordPress is that the theme would still work without upgrading. The designer just won’t be able to take advantage of the new functionalities.

What makes ModX an ideal CMS solution is the template variable, which is a custom field. A site can have as many custom field as it is required. This is one of the areas that ModX is stronger than WordPress.

With all that said, I haven’t built anything with ModX. I need a simple project to get it rolling, but I can’t think of any at the moment. A client site would be a great project for ModX.