Durban Website Designers

I have spent the best part of a week, on & off, playing with this to see whether it can be offered as a CMS to clients.

Having looked through the online instructions and battled with poor technical writing, I decided to buy the only book on MODx - and it was worth it, saving hours of frustration.

As I have said before, all these CMSs claim to be ‘user friendly’ - ‘get your website up & running in minutes’.

Ha! It’s like ‘Only metres from the beach’. Right.

Having said that, there are only a few concepts that need to be mastered. I decided that for the evaluation, I wouldn’t follow the online docs or the book example so used the template I often use from Dynamic Drive  - the CSS fixed 3 column template. Slotted in fine.

Then I added my little radiussed box that is all the rage. Also fine. I used the content from zulu-culture.co.za as a smallish website with a few subsections.

The attraction of MODx as a designer is that it claims that any valid HTML template can be used. There are several ‘template variables’ that need to be added to make it a MODx template. These ‘TVs’ are chunks of code - like Javascript scrollers or meta tags that the user can edit from the backend.

The two other concepts are ‘chunks’, which are basically ‘includes’ and ’snippets’ which are bits of PHP code that do something. Most templates can be reduced to a bunch of includes, a menu area and a content area. The latter uses the TinyMCE editor which works fine although I prefer to get stuck into the code as it’s quicker.

The menu is easy enough but I thought I would use their builtin Wayfinder menu system together with JQuery to set up a CSS accordion menu. It worked too and users can add and delete pages! Other examples of snippets are logins and breadcrumbs. Any piece of valid PHP is fine. I thought I might chance my arm and add FormtoemailPro PHP formmail script as a snippet, all 80kb of it and it was accepted and the form worked fine.

Another exercise was to get database output to the pages. For simple SELECT and WHERE listings, all that is required is 4 lines of code as a snippet. I tried to use code from PHPMaker but as expected, that was kicked out with a flurry of errors.

The login presented a problem. I overreached myself and went for the WebloginPE addon which I couldn’t get to work. The builtin login works fine - but you need the book to work out how to do it. I got it to protect two sets of pages for two sets of users.

I tried a Stu Nicholls CSS image gallery - fine.

The search widget worked and I was able to set up a simple commenting system, either on a blog type page or on any page.

Joomla has 4,000 addons whilst MODx has a few hundred, spread over two versions of MODx. The Newsletter addon worked OK with a subscribe/user management system. The last thing to test - and it’s no big deal if it don’t work - is a forum. I cannot find anything in the plugins.

Summary

I think I’ll use it. The site (search-optimizers.co.za/modx) has all the basics that would be required by the average website. Next step is to use a totally different design (tvae.co.za would be a candidate) to see whether it could be accommodated.

It’s not difficult to set up manager-users and I think that they would be quite happy to edit, publish and delete pages.

Time to go I’m afraid. Three cars and only two parking spaces.

This is a great little car I’ve had for seven years. Not too many of them around, these ‘87 16V GTI Executives. It’s in good nick with a bunch of stuff replaced over the years. I’ve probably spent as much on the vehicle as I am selling the car for. Details are up at www.warthog.co.za/gti.

The buyers were happy to take the car without a test drive but, honest John that I am, I said I would take them. Right, big mistake. The car broke down.

I managed to get back - just but no spark. The local auto elec came around the next morning and got it going but the lack of spark was the least of the problems. It needed a new fuel divider for the injection system - and then a replacement lift fuel pump. I’ll let you know what the bill is - I’m guessing I’ll be lucky to get away with R2,500.

The buyers were happy to wait the 5 days to get the car. Pity, because I had a couple of buyers lined up and which I could bump the price up for to compensate for the repair. Still, a deal is a deal and they had put down a deposit.

An Unwelcome Guest

A rat - I think. Sonali found food moved from the waste bin to the veg rack. Today I found a pile of what looked like dried mud next to the yard door. It turned out that something had tried to eat its way through the door jamb so it’s off to get some Rattex this morning.

The warthog.co.za website has done well for ‘website designers durban’ on Google for many years. It was the #1 website for a long time but has recently been displaced and now sits at about #5.

So, last year, durban-website-designers.co.za was put up and has been #1 on the local Google for those keywords for several months. I don’t keep an eye on ‘website designers’ on the local Google because its usually occupied by Mr sawebsitedesigner.co.za who has been on the top for years. I quite like the website for its chattiness and I’m sure he does a good job.

I noticed a few months ago that the dwd website was loitering on that list at about #9 so I was surprised yesterday when I wandered over to that part of Google and saw that it was #1 for website designers countrywide. SA is not my market but its nice to see that with not too much effort, you can get to the top of a heap of your peers - most now claiming to be ‘SEO Specialists’.

The true test of whether I like a website of mine is to come back to it after a few days and every time I return to that website I like what I’ve done with it. The home page premise was to get as much useful information on the page without making the page look cramped.

It won’t stay there of course but it’s nice to pat yourself on the back.

Now I have to promote my other two website design websites: webpage-designers.co.za and website-designers.co.za. I have also just registered search-optimizers.co.za and will stick something there at some point.

A short post this time.

Anyone who has had experience with content management systems has also had the experience of frustration in all its manifold disguises. The fact that there are more than one thousand CMSs doesn’t help.

I have developed a couple of Joomla websites and while Joomla is well supported it is incredibly slow to develop. Edits take absolutely forever - whether on Windows or on Linux. The one site had to have a cron job to flush the cache every two hours or the site would constipate terminally.

The most irritating thing for a web developer looking for a CMS is that they all claim to be user friendly, intuitive, up & running in 5 minutes. The smaller CMSs like Toko are fairly easy to set up but limited in functionality. I was looking for something that could be employed on every site if necessary so I took a swing through the Net Tuts article on ‘ten top CMSs for Usability’.

The article itself is very illuminating even though every man and his dog knows that ranking CMSs is impossible. Its like saying - ‘We choose the best car for the average man’ - impossible.

What is really good about the article is the response it generated. All sorts of opinions - WP, Drupal and Joomla all had their adherents and evangelists. But, there were a whole bunch more that dropped through the ceiling - Expression Engine, Concrete 5, Chyrp and a bunch of others.

The CMS that got the most widespread support was MODx so I wandered in and took a look. And again - the ‘CMS for designers’, ‘just pop any webpage into the template’, ‘ if it works on its own, it will work in MODx’.

Now, having played with it for a day, getting a basic site up, even with an accordion menu, I wanted to explore a login system that’s sure to be asked for. This is where the problems with open source manifest themselves and the real beast is revealed.

The forums are the first place to go and one sees - with other CMSs too - a continual complaint from designers about the CMS being a CMS built by Geeks for Geeks. The help pages confirm this. There are wide assumptions made that you know something about PHP. I understand the ’snippets’ that call functions and I understand ‘chunks’ which are really ‘includes’ but I am a website designer trying to use a cobbled-together collection of PHP scripts that you should at least be able to hack.

The latest problem came with a one-size-fits-all login system. It looks fantastic - WebloginPE - and I followed the instructions and got a bunch of parse errors. Followed them again with the same result. So, now I go looking for help, and look, and look. All I see confirms that I must be the thickest bloke on the planet.

I will persevere because once I get past around three hurdles I will be able to drive the beast. Stay tuned for more.