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MODX

Score9 out of 10

4 Reviews and Ratings

What is MODX?

The MODX Digital Experience Platform provides everything you need to build, host, and maintain amazing websites your way.


The vendor says that with MODX CMS and cloud hosting, users have complete control over their creative vision and the experiences they deliver, without restriction or compromise. They can focus more on building great digital experiences, and less on hosting and maintaining. If you ever need help, MODX Professionals are available worldwide and direct support from the MODX team is available anytime.


According to the vendor, MODX CMS is the fastest, most flexible, scalable and secure open source PHP CMS. Launch any design and use any front-end framework you want—if you can prototype it, MODX can power it with pixel-perfect precision. Extend MODX capabilities with MODX Extras, an ever-expanding collection of plugins and integrations perfectly built to help you get the most from MODX.


Build, host, and maintain all your PHP projects with MODX Cloud Hosting. While built to get the most from MODX CMS, MODX Cloud brings blazing-fast, secured, maintained and well supported hosting for any modern PHP application. The robust, easy-to-use tools available in MODX Cloud empowers creators to confidently manage digital experiences with ease—no DevOps team needed - without fear of breaking their sites.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

MODX Manager Interface
SEO Management - page level
Easy editing landing page
Edit files directly
Create & edit custom fields
Edit templates in the manager

1 / 7

Top Performing Features

  • SEO support

    The CMS helps users create the right website infrastructure (pagination, page headers, titles, meta tags, url structure, etc.) to increase the site’s visibility in search engine results.

    Category average: 7.6

  • Role-based user permissions

    Permissions to perform actions or access or modify data are assigned to roles, which are then assigned to users, reducing complexity of administration.

    Category average: 8.3

  • Code quality / cleanliness

    Code generated by WYSIWYG editor is clean and validates according to W3C standards.

    Category average: 8

Areas for Improvement

  • Availability / breadth of extensions

    There is a broad library of extensions, plug-ins, modules or add-ons that allow users to easily customize their websites without building custom code.

    Category average: 7.5

  • Library of website themes

    A library of website frameworks or themes is available as a starting point for building a website.

    Category average: 7.2

  • API

    An API (application programming interface) provides a standard programming interface for connecting third-party systems to the software for data creation, access, updating and/or deletion.

    Category average: 8

Why I think modx beats all other CMS that I have tried to far (I built sites using more than 5 other popular CMS)

Pros

  • Customize, no limits anything is possible in terms of design and output.
  • Scalable, can grow fast in terms of page numbers and still serve them faster than most CMS out there.
  • Security - its really secure esp if you harden it. Knock on wood, but we never had a MODX site hacked.
  • Fast - caching is great really great speeds
  • Quality add ons - instead of 1000000 plugins MODX has a few that are written really well and do everything you need, fast and optimized.

Cons

  • Releases - MODX 3 is taking long to get released
  • Small community

Return on Investment

  • Bigger learning curve but well worth it

Alternatives Considered

WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal and Concrete5

Other Software Used

PrestaShop, Drupal

Usability

For our university MODX stood out among the rest!

Pros

  • Ease of use - the MODX platform is very easy to use for someone who may have limited experience in content management.
  • Content blocks - the content blocks within MODX add to the usability and customization of the website being managed.

Cons

  • Content Blocks - I mentioned this as a strength, but it also has its quirks. There are times that things do not function properly within the content blocks we have set up.
  • More Customization - The ability for the average user to customize more without having to know a ton of code.

Return on Investment

  • The positive impact that MODX has had on our organization is that it has allowed us to generate more organic traffic to our site.
  • We are also able to push more paid advertisements to our site on our lead generation landing pages.

Alternatives Considered

WordPress

Other Software Used

FileZilla, Airtable, SEMRush, Cisco Webex Calling, Join.me, GoToMeeting

MODX Can Be a Developer's Dream if Content Authors Get Onboard

Pros

  • Custom design capabilities.
  • Works well with plugins.
  • Permission systems for users.

Cons

  • The user interface was confusing at times.
  • Not a plug and play CMS system.
  • The site manager doesn't always run fast.

Return on Investment

  • Increased security permissions of the users and freelancers who worked on our website.
  • Gave our developers the ability to create any page that they wanted with custom code.
  • Hindered our Marketing team's ability to stay on top of our content strategy with changes.

Alternatives Considered

WordPress, Yoast Wordpress SEO Plugins, HubSpot and Unbounce

Other Software Used

Unbounce, Yoast Wordpress SEO Plugins, HubSpot