Toad Blog: Thoughts on Web Design

Louisville KY Web Design, Graphic Design, Marketing, Advertising Blog

Who are you?

January30

If you don’t know who you are, you can’t say no. If you can’t say no, you end up overextended. If you end up overextended, you get stressed and don’t have time to figure out who you are. If you don’t have time to figure out who you are and you are overextended, then the market and all of your “yeses” define who you are. That’s sort of like driving on a freeway and not changing lanes or taking any exits but being controlled by the other cars around you. You end up not having a destination.

Eventually you run out of gas.

So who are you?

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Which Share Button?

December14

Very quick tip today. Someone asked which set of share buttons to use.

We like Add to Any. I think it gives you the most custom options and templating possibilities. We’re all about template freedom.

http://share.lockerz.com/buttons/customize/

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HOW TO: Use the MODX File Manager to upload images (Evo)

November4

A lot of folks do not know that there is a file manager in MODX or that you can use it to upload things. The following was written to assist a client but the principles apply to any MODX user. One caveat, you must set permissions on the folder that you wish to upload to, to allow you to upload. If you do not know how to do that then you need to ask your webmaster to do it for you. Until that happens, the upload feature will be inhibited. It will give you a message telling you that you do not have permission to write to that directory.

All right, so when you login, you will see the home screen in the manager.

MODX Manager - Evolution Home Screen

Click “Elements.” then click “Manage Files”

File Manager - MODX Evolution

 

Then under “Files” click “Assets”

 

How to find images folder - MODX

 

and under that you will click “Images”

MODX images folderr

 

Nearly all MODX Evo installs have the images folder in this place in their directory structure. It is the folder that works with the built-in image editor. I am assuming that you want to add images to work with this built-in image manager. Most of the time the template images, or images that work with your css and templates will be located under “templates”  in a subdirectory named for the template you are using.  Those are not accessible to the main image editor/browser. So if you want to delete or change a template image then you will need to look there and use this file manager or ftp to delete or replace it.

You can create subdirectories in your images folder using the MODX image library browser in your Rich Text Editor (and we recommend it) to organize your images. In this example we are working with product images, so we will have several subdirectories, including a thumbnail directory.

Say you need to upload all of the thumbnail images. Click on the thumbnail subdirectory link and that opens the thumbnail folder. You can always figure out where you are in the directory structure by looking at the path at the top of the page.

 

How to upload photos modx

Then you will need to scroll all the way down to the bottom. There you will see “Choose File.”

When you click that, you can browse to your folder on your computer and choose the file you wish to upload. When you do this then it will add the file name to a list at the bottom. It will not upload the files until you click Upload.

Upload image to MODX

You can choose more than one file and when you are finished click “Upload file”

Upload images to MODX

When you are finished, you should see a success message at the top of the page.

Success message - uploading images in modx

I would do the upload in small batches of two or three so you don’t overload the system if you are uploading bigger images (over 100K or over 500 px wide or tall) .  You can experiment and see how many it will handle, it will vary with your server capabilities and your own computer’s bandwidth. If the upload takes a long time or you do not see a success message then you are probably timing out and the image is too large. Size the image down by saving it for web in Photoshop or Photoshop elements, or adjust your maximum upload size in the MODX main configuration area and this should solve the problem.

You may have guessed you can upload doc and pdf files the same way. To put them into your file library that is accessible in your rich text editor, you will upload them to assets/files. Videos are usually placed in assets/media.

 

Happy MODX’ing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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