Our team has been working with MODx for quite some time now. It’s an amazing CMS for people who know what they are doing, next to all those morons who sell Joomla and WordPress installations for a shitload of money, but can’t really do any real customization.
I am not even going to mention getPage and all this crucial stuff. I am going to point you to a few extensions that actually make life easier for you:
1. Collections
Who would have thought that. While MODx is built for huge sites and a lot of content, you will at some point lose track of our structure if you have a lot of content. It also lets you define default child templates, so there’s no need to use something like inheritTemplate. It really makes maintenance a lot more convenient and your customers won’t get lost in the menu structure because there’s so much content. It’s still under development, but this thing is a diamond in the rough.
2. Quickstart Buttons
I am a big fan of not having to explain everything a million times to a customer. Ever tried explaining, why certain stuff in WordPress does show up in the main menu and other stuff doesn’t? Or even worse, in Joomla!? This is going to make life easier for your customers. You’re finall going to have some actual use for the dashboard :) This Dashboard-widget will present you with a set of buttons that you can customize. It’s part of the modmore-repository.
3. addressGPS
I have been missing this for a long time. Sometimes, customers have tradeshows, certain store locations, events, etc. and they want to add some Map or anything to it. This little helper will provide you with a template Variable that will resolve and address to coordinates, which will be available as placeholders in the template. Pretty neat, so you can just have your customer add an address in a field and add something like this to the template/chunk:
<img alt="map location" src="http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/staticmap?center=\[\[*gps.latitude\]\],\[\[*gps.longitude\]\]&zoom=8 &markers=\[\[*gps.latitude]],\[\[*gps.longitude\]\]&size=300x300&sensor=false" />
Pretty cool. And simple.
4. pThumb (unfortunately no documentation-page)
pThumb is a complete re-write of the phpthumbof package and can be used as a drop-in replacement. It uses lightweight classes, has its own caching rules and the generation of images, paths and names is a lot more SEO friendly that what you are probably used to. This might appear to be only a minor thing, but it’s a pretty huge improvement.
We have been building stuff in MODx for so long, projects have grown bigger and bigger, and considering multi-language sites, responsive designs, flexible custom content that needs to be filtered, re-styled and re-formatted, these four little helpers actually made our life a lot easier.
All of the packages are freely available.