We had made use of TVs in simpler sites, it’s just that this large, complicated site we did ended up having all sorts of snippets in all sorts of places! A lot of spec changes late in the day meant the site became more complex than originally envisaged. But I can appreciate that with sufficient time and thought, it should be possible to make the content management bulletproof.

- Take the snippet call out of the [*content*] for the news listing page, this way the client can’t get to it and ruin all your hard work! Don’t ever let them near snippets or chunks

TV’s are massively powerful when used properly. You can tailor the input so the client can’t really get it wrong! Your always going to have problems when they get loose with a wysiwyg, but by splitting the editable content areas up into TV’s you make it easier for the users to find their way around.

Document groups and Roles allow you to completely customise what the client sees when they log in. I usually hide all the dynamic pages using snippets, to prevent the client removing snippet calls. I hide all the nav I know the client will not use.

You need to check out the frontend editor in Evolution, I think you will like it.

MODx Revolution is going to be in beta for a bit longer but MODx Evolution will continue to evolve (no pun intended). If your clients are “messing” things up there are usually two reasons, they are given too much responsibility in how they manage the content or they are confused by all the fields to “ignore” in the manager.

One thing to do is always see how you can limit the styles in the output for the client. Ideally the content block should have nothing more than paragraphs, h1-h6 and floated images in it. If your clients are left having to style things, they probably should be in TVs or Chunks. There are basically 3 types of content you will have are pure content (the text and related but freestyle images and headings. Like an individual article or blog post), serialised content (like blog or new site or staff members, repeated content), portal content (content from multiple sources but no unique content of its own).

Finally if you want to limit what the site editor sees on login you should really install ManagerManager which allows you to control the names and visibility of all the fields associated with a template (and other resources). For a blog you could change the name of Pagetitle to “Post title” or if it was a staff directory Pagetitle could be Member Name.

There is a tonne of flexibility and it can make it a little harder on the developer/designer but far easier on your client.

If you want to learn more about how to make client site management easier in MODx please let me or the MODx team know.

Cheers,

Jay.

Yes, I have heard great things about MODx Revolution, and also see excitement about the recent 1.0 Evolution release, so will have to check those out sooner rather than later.

One thing we have found with MODx is that clients can find it a bit hard to use and/or mess things up here and there. I hear that the back end has changed a lot in Evolution 1.0 which may help that. Have you found non tech savvy clients having issues? Are there plugins that can help?

I’ve been working with another CMS called ExpressionEngine of late, which hasn’t caused issues with clients yet (touch wood!) but has a fair few “quirks” for developers. At the moment, if a site has a lot of structured content types or a lot of membership based functionality, we veer towards using EE, whereas if it’s more of a typical website with lots of general pages, we use MODx. Building sites with MODx seems to be easier for standard sites though, so if the back end was a bit more foolproof for clients we would definitely focus on MODx.

U should check out the Revolution 3 beta for some of the cool new features, including a very posh ajax manager and a Package browser that lets you browse, download and install new snippets and plug-ins directly from the manager…how cool is that!!! No ftp etc…posh

I read parts of said book, and found it quite good. The only “issue” I see is that this book services the Evolution branch(MODx 0.9.6.3) and Revolution is a completely different beast altogether. This book may be obsolete when they start pushing Revolution.

Beware of Phx btw…it can seriously show down your pages!! Use it sparingly.