The Difference between MODx and WordPress
Update: It’s been 2 years since i wrote this post and a few things have changed. WP has made their software much easier to update and has streamlined some workflow issues. While I stand by my stated preference for MODX on most projects, I now can (and do) recommend WordPress for some smaller sites with basic templating needs, or blog-centric sites. I will do a full write-up/update as soon as I can.
That said, MODX Revo has also made great strides. I’m suspicious of change (known for it) and loathe to change if I have something that works. I love MODX Evo and for most of our small businesses clients, it is more than adequate and we prefer it.
However there has been a plot afoot to force me to use Revo and I will admit, it’s just BOSS. I have some UI features I’d like to change. But I can’t rave enough about how flexible and powerful it is. I will write more about the differences between MODX Revo and Evo soon. The main point is that Revo smokes pretty much anything I have seen in terms of flexibility, scalability, and raw power. If your priority is non-scary UI with ease of updating by nontechnical users choose Evo. If you need a more Enterprise scale system, choose Revo. You can use Revo for smaller projects but the front-end editor still isn’t there and for many smaller sites, it is overkill.
- July 19,2012
I’m fighting an urge to parody Carlin’s famous football/baseball soliloquy. I need to admit that right now and get it out of my system.
Okay. Difference between MODx and WordPress.
Let me start out by saying that even though we encourage MODx adoption to anyone who sits in front of us for more than 3 seconds, it isn’t best for everyone and we know that.
WordPress was built to be a blogging engine. It’s a really good blogging engine. It has a massive community, lots of one-click-to-install features, it can be extended into a fully functioning brochure website and a fully functioning website with richer features if you spend some time with it and know what you’re doing. It is great for search engine optimization. A basic blog can be assembled literally in minutes. This blog you’re reading now is actually published with WordPress. We like WordPress and use WordPress and help other people customize WordPress. I’m even a speaker at WordCamp Louisville. For some people, WordPress is the best solution. It’s very user-friendly. If you have strict parameters on your site and are specific in what your site needs to do, it is a good choice.
WordPress is like a really awesome minivan. It has lots to make you comfortable. It’s roomy. It handles well.
MODx is like a James Bond Car, fully tricked out by Q.
Some people will roll their eyes at me for saying that, but they only will do so if they don’t understand the magic that is the Template Variable (TV), or as we like to call it in our fully customized admin, “Other Stuff” And also if they don’t understand the new MODx release, Revolution.
MODx blogs. It is search engine friendly. You can create user groups, web users and manager users, with different roles, easily. You can allow/restrain them from logging in at certain hours on certain days of the week. You can control every element of every screen they see, down to the help tool tips… in minutes. Need the user interface tweaked for clarity and usability? no problem. You can manage all your files, back up your database, flawlessly integrate ajax without conflicts and hours of headaches, fully integrate and admin full flash sites, deal with xml, xhtml, pdfs, docs, every media form you can imagine, and still understand it all and explain it to a three year old in about ten minutes. MODx can handle e-commerce. It makes sense to designers and developers alike and allows them to work on projects at the same time, easily. A lot of of this due to one tiny little thing that MODx has, and no one else has. Template Variables.
Here is how it works. I design a web page. I then decide what I want you to be able to edit. Say, a photo. I’ll name that photo [*myPhoto*] and whenever MODx sees that little doohickey in the code, it will make a form on my admin for me to choose a photo, and then replace that doohickey (technical terms only, please) for me with whatever photo I’ve chosen when it serves up the pages. Did I mention the built-in image editor? Yes, you can crop without opening Photoshop. Right there. You can also write on the image, and do a host of other image editing functions… right there, no plugins needed.
I can put these little pieces of code wherever I want. And they can be different types of things, things that make coding much much easier. Faster. Less Expensive. So you pay me the same rate and get lots more bang for your buck, because editing and changing and upgrading and improving is easier. That means your website is what we call “scalable.” Really, really scalable.
It also means you get all the search-engine-optimized advantages of a blog …but it doesn’t need to look like one at all. the templating structure is open and completely customizable without hacking the core code. This is a big deal. But what is a bigger deal is that the way this works will mean your code validates and loads quickly, both of which are hugely important for SEO. Someone who went out and bought a template which may or may not validate and then loaded 50 third-party plugins, all of which have not been tested to see if they conflict or work together, cannot say that. Those plugins that don’t have valid code can actually hurt your SEO performance, which means it will hurt your potential sales. Not to mention the time you will pay the developer for implementation and testing to resolve issues. Then just TRY the “one click” upgrade of the core and the plugins… and watch all of your customizations disappear. That is usually due to the fact that you have to hack things to get them to work together or do what you want. Or look the way you want.
Found an interesting comment from developer Jeff Eaton, written in Dec of ’09:
“WordPress’s stellar UX is stellar in large part because it focuses on streamlining the blogging experience. It’s possible to do a lot more with WP, but it means building new UX conventions, administrative tools, and UI assets for the newly expanded set of tasks. The broader that task set becomes, the more work it takes. That’s not a slam on WP at all, rather an acknowledgment that projects seeking to ‘make things as simple as wordpress’ had better think hard about what ‘things’ their users really want and need.”
WordPress is trying to up their game. They have introduced a feature called ShortCodes that to me looks a bit like Template Variables. However in actual implementation, there is still a large amount of issues in using them. Ryan Thrash told me a story this week about an ad firm that used MODx, and then tried to re-do their website in WP 3.0.1. They started and immediately had to develop custom widgets and plugins to accomplish what they’d planned. Two weeks into development, they realized that if they kept with the WP platform, they would not make deadline. They started over with MODx and were able to roll out the site in 18 hours.
Again, Jeff Eaton says:
“I participated in an interesting exercise at last year’s (2008) SXSW – a ‘CMS showdown’ where Joomla!, Drupal, and WordPress teams were given a design and a spec by an actual client and asked to implement what they could in a timebox. The results were interesting — The WP team delivered all the same functionality (access control, multi-user blogging, message boards, photo galleries, even calendars, membership groups) that the J! and Drupal teams did. However, the client evaluating the results found the resulting WordPress site’s administrative interface to be the most confusing and baffling for their team.”
I find that really interesting because I know that training my clients who use both systems, the MODx users have a much easier time with calendars, albums, slideshows, event registration, complex pieces of site administration, than the WP clients do. That’s because the UI (User Interface) of WordPress was meant to do blogging well. These other functions have been added. MODx was built with the intent of doing it all. MODx also requires much much less maintenance, which translates into a lower cost.
We prefer to spend our time working on your site copy, design, a/b testing to up your conversion rate and strategy. We want to help you develop great content. We don’t want to spend all our time troubleshooting and coding. So if you are an individual or have an existing website and want to blog and the core content of your site is a blog and you don’t want much else? or it isn’t possible to port you to MODx because of legacy systems? We will suggest WordPress. For the blog. We’ll usually add it on to an existing site or install a fresh WP blog for a new user who is an individual with limited need for scalability. That means their site will not need to grow much beyond its original intent and purpose.
For everyone else, we suggest MODx.
MODx handles blogging well by the way. It does that too.
Please understand, this is in no way a slight against WordPress or WordPress users, it is merely a statement of what we do and why we do it. Our thinking on the subject is, “right tool for the right job.”
I hope that helps.
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Thanks. This answered most of my questions.
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Great article.
I use both Modx and WordPress, but after yet another problem with WordPress I’m seriously thinking of moving the whole blog over to Modx.
Also, you say that Modx can handle ecommerce.
I’ve yet to find a plugin or solution that works easily in Modx, so I’d like to hear your thoughts on this.
I’ve tried Foxy cart and thought it was unbelievably complicated.
Anyone built a custom cart in Modx?
Okay, first thing I’ll tell you is that there really is no such thing as plug and play ecommerce. Ever. Each project has Stuff you have to deal with that will make some tweaking necessary. FoxyCart is about as simple and easy as it gets and works well for smaller inventories without the need for tight integration on the fulfillment side. But even that can be built with MODx, there is an xml feed from FoxyCart that is just handy and can be used for all sorts of good things. The issue is, you’re going to have to build screens and chunks and tv’s and work with that xml. No, you can’t click a button and install and poof. Cart. If you want that? well I hear there is a solution in the works called VisionCart that will be more along those lines. Google. What we’re doing is saving these things into a db for reuse, my developer is trying to streamline the process, so if we need a cart? we take the pre-worked chunks and tvs, etc and upload them straight into the db rather than working through the admin…and poof. Shopping cart that works with FoxyCart. When we get this process perfected? We’ll share. But see, you might need different components than we do, so there will still need to be effort made. A lot of times, re-working what someone else uses is more work than doing it yourself. Is it really that hard to make an item description template and a product list template? I don’t think so. and that’s about what it boils down to.
The alternative to using something like Mal’s or FoxyCart, or waiting for VisionCart is to install a build of Magento or you particular favorite …and do a mash-up. Tricky as most ecommerce platforms have what they think is a cms… (please!) that …well….let’s just say it isn’t robust. So you can strip out that stuff and just use the ecommerce bits with MODx. My understanding is that this will be easier with Revolution and I’m dying to try it. Haven’t gotten to it yet though I do want to, I think Magento + MODx = wowsa.
There are varying levels of ecommerce needs on the backend- some people need inventory control that communicates with in-house office systems or accounting systems, shipping systems or corporate databases. Some people don’t. So the level of the project matters. But I think we’ll see a Revolution solution that can handle the larger, more tightly integrated and enterprise level ecommerce shops within the next year. Revo is new still, remember that. That’s my educated guess. I’ve done ecommerce builds in osCommerce, zenCart, Mal’s (by far my favorite for small businesses and nonprofits and it does work well with MODx) and CandyPress on the Windows platform. CandyPress is a small wonder in itself, I really like it. I’ve worked a little bit with Magento, and just from what I’ve done so far with it, am amazed. As soon as I’m get some space it’s on the list for me to dig into deeply.
But just from your post? I’ll tell you to go hit bigcommerce.com, and take a look, it might meet your needs…it’s very well done.
hope that helps.
oh and you can see a FoxyCart + MODx ecommerce build we did at http://www.smokymountainguitars.com
Pretty objective article, thanks.
I used MODX for years and it brill. Revolution looks amazing and really powerful. However there is one area I feel needs further debate and that relates to the inexperienced user who simply wants to add video, images etc and has no desire to ever enter a line of HTML.
Overall, the UX experience in MODx is good, but more could be done. For example when adding YouTube video in wordpress is easier. Revolution does not have a front-end editor right now (it will come and for most people they would simply use the rich editor in the manager), but some users like to work 100% visually. Also, look at email templates from mailchimp and campaign monitor, they have repeatable regions which is ideal to make it easy for users to enter content without having to create sub pages or create multiple TV’s.
Like I say, MODx is what I use 95% of the time, but if the front-end was more flexible for unskilled users, MODx would be truly amazing. I think engaging with non-tech users, reviewing Facebook, Twitter interfaces and common tools users use for uploading and resizing images on the fly would be worthwhile. I would certainly like to see MODx or someone create a “UX for the user” group with a focus on developing the very best, easiest tools for users to edit and update their websites including updating from mobile apps. would be awesome.
I just LOVE MODx, have been using it for 2 years now and my workflow is faster, alot more flexible and clients love it!
WordPress is good to, I still use it alot, but I I had the choice it would be MODx all the time!
Great article:) Thanks a lot. Found it due to link to our blog and have been sharing this link to many people because I have had too many debates with WordPress lovers. I agree WordPress 3 is a powerful tool and we build some types of websites also always on WordPress but only websites that are blog type.
For example one customer just needed video contest website where every month people upload theid videos, vote and in different categories winners will be chosen. Leaderboards and Facebook integration. Sounds really easy with WordPress, no? WordPress even has Facebook integration plugins.
@ Anne – at the moment WordPress E-commerce plugin is better than MODx any e-commerce solution but that will change soon. As I love MODx I have already been using shopping cart snippet and my own product browser snippet with Ditto sorting, front end AJAX multiple product editing at the same time ability and ability to add products into multiple categories. Anyway – that’s mainly because I just love it not because it’s most sensible way of doing it.
Why MODx is great mainly is because I can write something using any other framework within MODx. For example I use a lot Zend: http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php?topic=50837.0 and lately discovered Yii framework.
Kaspar – For anyone that would have high volume sales (a florist or other e-tailer…for example) or a large inventory, I’d have to go with an actual cart platform like Magento or CandyPress (for smaller inventories) and wouldn’t dream of using a CMS, any CMS for their solution.
The reason is that the fulfillment side (the software that works with the inventory and shipping and their in-house accounting software) needs to be robust or else the client will lose time which means losing money. We plan for tight integration, that’s part of the build.
WP might have a cool ecommerce plugin, I know however that 90% of my people who just need to accept payments/donations occasionally or have downloadable or subscription products or just have a slower sales cycle because their products are high dollar items? They can be served adequately by either WP or MODx/FoxyCart or Mals-E. I think it is really strange no one uses Mals more with MODx as it is a really cool product. But to me, scalability trumps all else, and nothing is more scalable than MODx.
We’re working on an ecommerce build now and I proposed both Magento and MODx as solutions. This client will probably stretch the limits of what I like to do with MODx, and I’ll be building a lot of the pieces she needs since we didn’t go the Magento route. We’re also doing this in Revo, not Evo. But that said… we can do that because MODx is a content management -framework-, that and her inventory isn’t huge. I can’t imagine doing the same with WP, even if they do have a cool plugin.
as far as the multiple categories, we use tags to define categories, along with the regular site tree? and I just sort of love how it works. You’ve peaked my interest though about the WP plugin, I’ll go take a look. Also will look at your post on Zend, awesome.
and thanks for sharing the post
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