greg smart

I recently created a MODx snippet using a technique described on CSS-Tricks. This little bit of PHP code calls in the Yahoo Weather RSS feed and allows you to generate output that can be styled using CSS and your own icons. You can modify the first line of the snippet below to output weather specific to your zip code.

I first created the snippet ‘Weather’ ( Here is the snippet code.), then simply placed the snippet call on the appropriate page: [!Weather?!]. I then used my CSS document to style the output and created containers that would display the appropriate class ( Here is my CSS document). I created a div tag that carried my icon as a background image. I figured if Yahoo generated a tag that was unaccounted for in my CSS then my scheme would continue to display the appropriate text while leaving the adjacent background image undisplayed (as opposed to the little red Xs if I had used an image tag). Since I am using transparent gifs, I figured no one would be the wiser should this occur. Gif’s were derived from Nordic Weather.

You can see it in action on the Batesville, Arkansas Area Chamber of Commerce website.

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I was recently reading the excellent Paul Boag article “The 5 Hidden Costs of Running a CMS” about the many pitfalls of Content Management Systems (CMS).

We all know content management systems (CMS) can be beneficial for most websites. However, they do come with five hidden costs.

Many think of a content management system as a magic bullet that solves all of their content woes. Unfortunately the cost of a CMS is greater than its price tag. Before making a decision about whether to adopt a CMS, or indeed which CMS to choose, you first need to be aware of the hidden costs. These include:

1. The cost of training
2. The cost to quality
3. The cost to functionality
4. The cost of redundancy and flexibility
5. The cost of commitment

In my opinion, the first two points are the most daunting and the hardest to relate to the customer prior to beginning the development process. Most recently we have been using the MODx system as a CMS. While training is always an issue I have found that the current incarnation (0.9.6.1) is fairly intuitive for a novice user. In a single, “light user” scenario I normally only need a single face-to-face meeting (if possible) and 1-2 short telephone support sessions.

The second issue I would like to address is the cost to quality. Although this can be a tricky topic, the TinyMCE default WYSIWYG editor present in MODx produces relatively clean code, allowing for easy modification to available tags to which my user(s) have access.

As far as functionality, redundancy and flexibility I think our capabilities have actually increased as we have implemented more of these systems. MODx is not just a CMS, it is a development framework that leaves me with capabilities I would not have otherwise had and it comes with a minimal commitment.

As far as MODx being the Pleth CMS of choice I would have to say that the jury is still out. There are many situations in which Wordpress or a custom CMS system is still appropriate, but to date, my personal preference is quickly becoming MODx.

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This is a follow up post from “Using jCarousel with MODx“. Thanks to BobRay and smashingred over in the MODx forums for their help on this.

What we have done is taken a site utilizing a custom MODx snippet, coupled with the jQuery, jCarousel photo gallery script and created a photo gallery that should require a minimal skill level to manage.

The Challenge

As mentioned in my previous post I was able to take MODx and jCarousel and produce an easy to use photo gallery that only needed images and an unordered list to populate the script content. Once the initial phase of the site build was complete, I realized that by creating a MODx snippet we could dynamically create this unordered list by only placing and removing images in a specific directory. In my opinion this would further simplify the process for adding and removing images from the gallery.

The Solution

A MODx snippet was created (Here is the snippet code.). In order to replicate this just create a snippet in MODx named ‘directory’ and then call it in where you want the gallery placed as [!directory? &Location=`yourdirectory`!]. Now the assumption here is that you are working with images inside of the ‘assets/images’ directory of Modx. Of course the jCarousel code is necessary as well. You can see the gallery snippet in action here.

NOTE: There is a slightly different jCarousel version for placement of multiple carousels on a single page.

More Possibilities

We are looking at the possibility of using this for more than just image galleries. This would likely require more extensive work with the snippet and would include the use of another snippet variable to denote the type and location of the document directory in question.

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