Hi everyone,
I just want to put up a roadsign here, pointing to something called Romanesco. I think a lot of long time MODX-ers will have created some sort of preconfigured base installation for themselves, to quickly start new projects. Well, Romanesco is mine.
I’ve been working on it for a while already (initial commit: Sun Jan 10 2016), starting in my spare time as you can see. Over the years, it has matured into something stable and helpful, and it’s being used in a dozen or so production sites. It’s even been on Github for most of that time, but lack of an automated installer and promotion meant it never really got much attention.
So to break free from perpetual obscurity, I decided to publish a command line installer, together with some information and instructions on how to get started. You can find it at https://romanesco.info (which is, obviously, also built with Romanesco).
The main Github repository is here:
The installer is basically a shell script that runs a bunch of commands for you on server level. It uses Gitify for all the interactions with MODX and can be found here:
One final note: this platform also relies on ContentBlocks and Redactor, which don’t need any introduction here I think… But that means you’ll need a license for these extras if you ever want to use Romanesco for a live project.
Have fun exploring / disecting / borrowing ideas from, and feel free to post any questions or feedback here or on Slack!
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Thanks for this @hugopeek. I will take a look.
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Nice one @hugopeek , this looks great!
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This looks awesome @hugopeek . I love ContentBlocks, but was wondering if it is possible to use this without Redactor? Could you create the base install and then change it out for a different WYSIWYG editor, or will that “break” stuff. If not I will have a deep-dive into this as it basically is what I have been looking to do for the longest time (maybe even longer than you!) and never found the time without getting too sidetracked 
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Hi Quentin, thanks! Yeah it should be possible to use with another RTE. It’s not using Redactor in any structural way, so I think you can just uninstall it and replace it with your preference.
The packages are not part of Romanesco itself, but installed by Gitify and committed to the project repository. I have been running into conflicts in the past when that separation was still a bit more “fuzzy”, but yeah I also want to use different packages (or different configs for the same package) for different projects sometimes, so this kind of flexibility is crucial.
And it’s been quite a long journey indeed. I was always lucky to have support from my (now former) employer and my clients, so I could stay focused on this. It’s definitely a marathon and not a sprint
By the way, which RTE do you want to use? Then I’ll quickly try to swap it out locally to see if it’s really that easy… (probably not 
)
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I am using TinyMCE Rich Text Editor at the moment, would be great to see if it is that easy 
I have about 100 questions, as alot of the stuff on the Romanesco website is on the edge of my current knowledge, so it isn’t intuitive and obvious. Could I reach out to you on an email when I bravey work my way through the Romanesco learing curve?
Yes, absolutely! My email is hugo at fractal-farming dot com.
I have long passed the point from where I can still see Romanesco through a fresh pair of eyes, so I’m curious to learn what you’ll be running into.
I just tested it briefly on a fresh Romanesco install (swapping Redactor for TinyMCE). The only issue I ran into was that the main rich text field in ContentBlocks is set specifically to type “Redactor”. So after removing Redactor, that stops working.
What you can do is duplicate that rich text CB field (don’t edit it directly, as it will be overwritten on updates) and then change the contentblocks.default_field system setting to the duplicated field ID. Also change the which_editor setting to TinyMCE and you should be good to go for new pages.
Some existing pages (created during installation) will have references still to the old RTE field and throw an error when you edit them. They’re not crucial though for proper functioning of Romanesco.
I’ll keep this issue in mind. Maybe next visit to the installer code, I can add a flag for installing an alternate RTE with a find/replace command to fix the current references.