Phill Sacre

Content Management Dilemma

—

by

Phill Sacre
in

As some of you may know, I am the webmaster for the Fordham Church website. It is currently using the MODx CMS. I quite like it – it’s quite flexible, easy to edit, and customising the look and feel is very easy.

However, it does have one drawback: the pages are all fairly static in nature. It’s not so easy to create a page which has regularly updated content (blog-style).

Recently I’ve been thinking about moving to a different CMS. MODx has been fine for now, but I want something a little more powerful. Basically, I’d like the front page to appear more like a blog, and also I’d like to publish an RSS feed of sermons etc. There are a couple of options here: Joomla, WordPress, and Drupal.

  • Joomla is a very powerful CMS. I’ve tried it before, and there were plenty of things you could do with it. The problem is, I think it might be a bit too powerful for what I want. If I was building a more complicated website this would be a good option, but I don’t think it would be so good for the Fordham site as it stands at the moment.
  • Drupal is another powerful CMS, although I think it’s a little less complicated than Joomla. I downloaded it and installed it on my machine at home last night… the problem is, I can’t help thinking that it might be overkill! There are a lot of options and features, most of which I probably wouldn’t need.
  • WordPress is what this blog is currently running on. The advantage to WordPress is that I know it. The disadvantage to WordPress is that I’m not sure it’s quite up to being a full-blown Content Management System just yet! You wouldn’t get all the advantages of something like MODx or Drupal with it. Having said that, I probably wouldn’t need all those features…

So, decisions, decisions! If anyone has any suggestions I’m always open to ideas 🙂

Comments

5 responses to “Content Management Dilemma”

  1. Matthew avatar
    Matthew

    Actually one of the things I like about MODx is that you CAN do blog style stuff with it, as there are a number of snippets you can install that extend the functionality. You can set up RSS feeds, manage a news section, allow people to leave comments, all that kind of thing. Just check out the Resources section of the MODx web site and you’ll find a whole load of snippets there. I use some of them on the Chelmsford Diocese web site, and they can actually be really powerful. And of course if you don’t find what you want you can easily create your own wih a little PHP!

    Reply
  2. Phill avatar
    Phill

    Yeah, you’re right Matthew… to be honest, half the problem is that I don’t really know what I want at the moment! I need to sit down with a pen and paper and work it out, I think… that will at least help me to make a decision!

    Reply
  3. Jay Gilmore avatar
    Jay Gilmore

    Phill, I would do exactly as you say and map out your content needs and the see if there are snippets that can do what you want with MODx as well. It would be faster and templating as you know is very easy. Modifying templates or changing sitewide templates is not hard in MODx at all.

    BUT if you are hoping to migrate the blog from WordPress to MODx it will be tricky as it WordPress does what it does well and MODx is missing an import or migrate function. You can certainly have a WordPress generated feed on the index of the site without even having to change either.

    Reply
  4. Phill avatar
    Phill

    Hi Jay, thanks for your comments! After your and Matthew’s comments I do think perhaps sticking with MODx would be best for the time being. I know my way around now, so any changes I want to make will be much easier.

    I will update soon with what I decide to do!

    Reply
  5. Jay Gilmore avatar
    Jay Gilmore

    I think the snippet you want to push your WordPress to the front page is called FeedX. I haven’t personally used it but I bet it will do the trick and apparently if you have the PHx Plugin installed there isn’t much you can’t do.

    Best of luck,

    Jay

    PS: MODx Forum username: smashingred

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related posts

Like this? Subscribe to my Substack.

Recent posts

Popular posts