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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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After looking over the SEOmoz article 11 Best Practices for URL’s I began thinking it might be beneficial to record my recent experiences with Modx. Particularly as it related to quick and easy creation of SEO friendly URL’s.

By utilizing the .htaccess file packaged with Modx to harness the power of Apache’s mod_rewrite engine, URL naming flexibility is within reach in minutes. All you have to do is uncomment the appropriate lines in the .htaccess file and upload it to the root directory of your install. The rest is just a matter of a few simple configuration tweaks inside of the CMS control panel.

Go to Tools->Configuration->Friendly URL’s and choose ‘Yes’. Also don’t forget to choose your appropriate suffix (.htm, .html, .php, etc.) that will be applied to all URL’s generated by the CMS.

Next within the document editor of any page within your site type the URL name within the ‘Document Alias’ field. This will be applied, along with the suffix, as the URL name.

That’s it, it’s that easy to create well formed, SEO friendly URL’s within a dynamic content management system. As I have been learning the ins and outs of Modx over the past few weeks I have found it is one of the more versatile tools I have come across as a developer. It is not a CMS for everyman due to it’s relative complexity, but it is just what the doctor ordered for a commercial developer in desperate need of a robust CMS system.

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