I have been using WordPress for a while for my website. I want to leave WordPress for something else. At the moment I don’t know where I want to move to. I am currently trying webflow. One feature I like is their CMS option where I can create collections easily.
In my situation, I host a jazz radio show since 1988. I have a lot of my shows in mp3 format. In webflow, you create an excel document with headers like show name, iframe, year, playlist etc… you save the file in .CSV format and then import it into webflow into fields. I can use these fields wherever I want. Does modx offer something similar? Does it offer similar functionality?
These are my needs. Security, relatively easy to set up, use, maintain, backup, great customer support, hopefully free like WordPress. I want to get away from the plugin way of creating a website that WordPress uses mainly because of security.
I don’t want to spend a lot of time maintaining the backend. I use cloudways to host my site (around $14/month). They take care of everything on the backend. Excellent service.
Other builders I looked at are squarespace, site123, Weebly, concrete5 to an extent. So. I need guidance. There are some things I find interesting about modx. Chunks, etc…
Look forward to hearing from people who may have been in the same situation I’m in or anyone else who can offer me some guidance.
I use castos to host my radio shows. Interviews. They use iframes that can be embedded in any website. That’s why I have an iframe header that I mentioned above.
I forgot to mention that I LOVE your videos!!
Please check out my website to get an idea what I am doing with my site. Thanks!!!
And welcome to MODX! We’re not the most famous of the CMS bunch, but like your radio show, we’ve been around for a while. So if you’re looking for a stable and secure platform that just gets the job done, then you should give it a try!
The core philosophy of MODX is Creative Freedom. You should be able to do what you want, use whatever framework or technology you want and have full control over the output of the CMS. There are plugins, or extras as we call them, to help with generic tasks such as creating menus or extracting resources from the database. But these extras are much less invasive than many plugins in WP, and they all leave you in charge of the templating with, indeed, these chunks of your own HTML.
For creating collections in MODX, similar to what Webflow offers, I recommend you take a look at the extras getResources (or pdoResources, which works the same way but focuses a bit more on performance, at the cost of a few conveniences) in combination with another extra called… Collections. If you decide to add each radio show as a resource, then Collections allows you to manage them in a convenient grid view in MODX. Then on the frontend, you can use getResources to generate overviews of the shows, similar to how you’re doing it on your current website. Just remember that you need to bring your own HTML/CSS/JS.
As for importing data into MODX: there is a CSV import option for resources, and also an extra called ImportX, but I have no experience in using them. I did a few imports from WordPress though, with these scripts as base:
Again, creative freedom means you’re able to do pretty much anything in the backend too, especially if you know your way around in PHP. There are also options to create your own database tables for your radio shows, so you can specify exactly what needs to be stored. If you want to manage this data in MODX with a UI, then you can use the native ExtJS framework to create what we call Custom Manager Pages (CMPs). But this comes with quite a steep learning curve, especially if you’re not very fluent in JavaScript. As an alternative, there is an extra called MIGX than can act as an intermediary for this kind of setup, offering you the ExtJS UI elements for managing your custom data in MODX through configuration instead of coding.
Hopefully this will give you some ideas of how to get started. Have fun, and just let us know if you have more questions!
And by the way: nice work you are doing. I love the sound of Bill Evans, so I’ll be tuning in to some of your shows these days
If you know PHP, then you can create your own code to manage a custom table, without using ExtJS at all. I’ve done this for everything from simple one-table data to complex customer management systems. If this interests you, let me know; there are a few tricks to setting this up. The advantage here would be that you could import your CSV directly into the database (using phpMyAdmin or whatever) to create the data table. Then you just need to make snippets to access that data.
But it’s likely that you can manage everything using Collections and the standard MODX Template Variables (TVs). You’d have to write your own import script, though, to convert the CSV file and put the data into the correct TVs. (So you’d need to know PHP for this approach as well, or find someone who can help you out.)
BUT, it sounds like your data is in Wordpress, not in a CSV now, right? It must use some custom fields? Getting that into any other CMS would take some custom scripting I imagine.
Hey Randy,
I’ll start with hosting. I don’t see any mention of cPanel on Cloudways website. If you want easy upgrades without the MODX cloud, any hosting that offers cPanel has the upgrade button.
Managing content via CSV is the opposite of using a CMS. Once you import your content from Wordpress you will find using the MODX manager to be a breeze.
Thanks for your comments!!! I know that webflow has a CMS feature where I can import my radio shows (they are hosted on the castos servers). Castos is a podcasting company so I would have to import the iframe code for each episode, including the episode name, year and playlist into tilda or webflow and take it from there.
I don’t think there are any simple and practical solutions because I have so much content. So far webflow looks straightforward with it’s CMS feature. Tilda which is another no code option I think has the same feature.
There are things I like about modx but I think that would involve a lot of coding.
I know modx is a CMS used by many people but I’m not that familiar with script creation etc… I just know some basic html and css.
Hi @rmcellig,
If you’re able to post an example of the Castos export, I’m pretty sure the community could put together a quick script to import it to MODX for you.
I was in the same situation as you about leaving WP. I then choose Modx and then found that Modx can do Magic. The catch is that you have to practice before become a master.
Take a look around, use Collections, Tagger, PDOtools, TinyMce, Ace, SEO Suit, FormIt, ClientConfig, a nice bootstrap theme and you are good to go.
Modx is the CMS you can trust. We all are here to help you.
If you are stuck with WP then I suggest you to try Pods Plugin there. But my recommendation is Modx with those Extras I mentioned.
ps this is a link of my most recent site developed for a client, built in Modx - click here
