MODx
This site is built on the MODx Content Managment System and this document describes the steps needed to build it and the various "gotchas" that took me a while to sort out and may catch others out. While using MODx is not exactly difficult, it does require some familiarity with HTML, PHP and CSS particularly if you want or need to do extensive customization.
MODx uses a particular vocabulary that it is vital to understand, because otherwise it is impossible to grasp how things fit together. Although some things may seem rather roundabout or unusual compared to <insert-your-favourite-CMS-here> the underlying rationale is to provide complete flexibility in a reasonably easy-to-control fashion. Learning all these concepts in one hit by reading the documentation can be daunting, but the key points to remember in order to get started are:
- Template - an HTML document that describes the overall structure of a page, containing various special "MODx tags" that will be replaced with specific content when the page is generated.
- Chunk - a named "chunk of HTML" that can be incorporated in a document (or template) to permit repetitive elements such as footers/copyright information/addresses/telelphone numbers etc to be incorporated into many documents allowing site-wide changes to be made easily.
- Snippet - a named "piece of PHP" that can be incorporated into a document (or template) and that will be executed when the page is generated so that the page can exhibit dynamic behaviour.
Great power and potentially great confusion arise from the fact that these things can be nested in various ways (so chunks might contain snippets etc).
Installation
I installed a blank-slate empty site (well, more precisely a one-page site "MODx CMS Install Success") using the default installation instructions which worked flawlessly on my particular set-up. Of the various CMS that I have tried, this has to be one of the simplest installs.