brassblogs

So, many people know that I do a lot of WordPress work, and have been doing it for a long time now. I believe my first foray into the WordPress world was sometime when version 1.5 was the newest release – so it’s been a while It’s been a wonderful ride, too.

No, I’m not getting off…. but I am test driving new cars.

One of the things I promised myself I would do while I was on this sabbatical was finally delve into things I’ve been wanting to learn, but never had the time to do. One such thing is a CMS platform called ModX. An old design colleague of mine first introduced me to this CMS, and has touted it’s wonderful-ness (about as much as I’ve touted WordPress to her), and she has since made the dive in trying WordPress out for herself. She’s done so many wonderful, wonderful things with ModX that I’ve been itching to take her advice and try it myself.

So this morning, I began my foray into the world of ModX. I downloaded the latest release and installed it on my loacalhost environment. So far, this is as far as I’ve gotten – but I wanted to stop and share these first steps with you.

WordPress has a “Famous 5-Minute Install,” and I have to say, ModX was just as easy to install…. quite possibly even easier, at least from a layman’s standpoint. (From my perspective as a programmer, it was on the same level, really.) I could see a lot of people who’d want to try out ModX thinking that it’s a lot easier to install than WordPress, because the installation process handles everything for you. Basically, it asks you a few questions (such as your database name and password) and then asks you if you want to use an existing database name, or have ModX create one for you (and if it creates it for you, you can choose what you want it to be named, as well as use the default table prefixes or one of your own making.) It’s really just a series of questions, and you can test each of your answers to see how it’s going through the process. If there’s a bump, it lets you know, and even suggests how to fix it.

At the end, you hit “install” and it lets you know, line-by-line, if the installation is going okay. It was really pretty freaking awesome.

And that’s all I had to do. It was literally less than 5 minutes to install it.

Right now, I’m perusing through the back end (from what I can see, it’s cool), and I’m looking on the ModX site for the documentation (when I work in WordPress, the Codex is my best friend, with the forums coming in a close second.) So far, I’ve found some promising things: they do, indeed, have a support forum, a wiki (the equivalent of the WP Codex, from what I can see), and a page that links to these items as well as an IRC channel! (Holy cow! I haven’t used IRC in freaking FOREVER.)

I think this is gonna be fun.