Build Smarter: Why MODX Is The CMS Your Website Actually Needs.

Good afternoon everybody. Just turned midday. We'll just give it another minute just to make sure that anybody else in the waiting room gets admitted and then we will get started. Just give it another minute and then we'll begin.

Okay, let's get started. Good afternoon, everybody. I hope that you are well. Thank you for joining this webinar today. I was asked to do this because it's something which is actually quite close to my heart. And it's actually talking all about MODX CMS, which I'm not too involved with much these days, mainly because I run in the organisation. But what I do hear from a lot of my team when they're dealing traditionally with new prospects is, you know, a couple of objections and we've been able to kind of help coach, mentor, not just the team, but also businesses, prospects into just opening up perspectives a little bit wider just to potentially explore and see what else is out there. 

So I'm just gonna go and share my screen and get started. Okay, so the title of the webinar today, Build Smarter, Why MODX is the CMS Your Business Actually Needs. So I'm not gonna be naming other content management systems. This is not a, you know, throw other ones to the fire. The goal really from today is just simply to allow you to explore what else is out there and actually how some of the common objections can actually be turned into positives. And I'm gonna explore those with you. So before we go through some of the rest of the content in the webinar, a little bit about me. So I was the Managing Director and Founder, depending on what day of the week it is, of GEL Studios, so a full service agency. And it started in 2013. And my background is development. And MODX was one of the first systems which I started using. And it came out of a place of frustration. So I'm gonna share some of those things with you today.

Personally, father to two boys in the pictures there. Massive Marvel and DC fan. In fact, I've just had to turn off TikTok because some leaks came out of the new Fantastic Four film. So I'm a little bit gutted about that. Massive fan of the colour green as well. So anything that you see throughout GEL, green, you know, the office and everything behind me, that's all, you know, that's all green. And more recently, a somewhat rather unhealthy obsession with getting stripes in my lawn. So I don't know if that's just something from getting a little bit older.

But maybe it's my OCD, I don't know, but I really enjoy doing that stuff. So about GEL Studios, we are a purpose-driven agency and I'm not gonna spend much time talking about this, but one thing I will say is a lot of people say, well, what does purpose-driven actually mean? Well, in short, any piece of work that we do, we can directly translate it to making a difference either in our team, our local community, or the environment.

And the way that we do that is normally we work with companies which are in it unapologetically to make profit, but we earmark a specific amount of our profits which come straight in and go straight back out in the form of expertise, donations, to other things in and around Swindon. I'm very, very proud of our vision statement, inspiring change through creativity. So today, what are we gonna go through? We're gonna go through where this webinar came from. One of the biggest objections, I haven't heard of it.

Now versus what's next, security, something for administrators and why I believe MODX is a smart choice. It might be worthwhile saying what this is not. So this is not an interactive demo of MODX in any way, shape or form. There's a little something at the end, an offer which people can take up if they want that guidance. But this is a much more holistic view, something from a strategic point of view that an organisation should think about when they're choosing about either overhauling their CMS or looking at putting something new in.

So a little bit of housekeeping, gonna have questions at the end. And all of these slides and this video format of this webinar will be shared with you afterwards. So let's get straight into it. Why this webinar? So we've been in business for over 13 years now and the common things keep coming up. You, I haven't heard of it. I want to use this. My team are telling me to use this. You know, where do these things come from? 

So in essence, I've summarised these two objections into two really, really clear audiences. So the first is in-house teams, which I believe are afraid of change. You, if you've got the working knowledge, if you've come from a previous role, if you've invested your own time into learning a content management system, then why change that? I get it. I absolutely get it. Why would you want to go and introduce something new into the mix, even more so if you don't know what it is? So emotional ties.

But what can they do? Well, they can prevent business-wide opportunities or on a personal level, opportunities to develop further. And I'm going to touch on something like this later in the webinar. And then incorrect assumptions from decision makers. So again, decision makers, their land of truth, their land of understanding comes from what they know. And if they're being fed information from in-house teams, from developers and other stuff, then of course they're going to lean on those pieces of trusted advice which they've come from.

But again, a lot of the conversations that we have in GEL Studios is not actually about just a website. It's about how does the website fit into your strategic goals? Going with a solution over here, you know, might be great for the short term, but will that actually help you in the long term? And we're covering, we're gonna cover that off later on in the now versus later section. So most of my conversations in my day-to-day role as leader of GEL Studios is definitely in, you know, the second pot. 

Speaking to business owners, decision makers about how their website can fit into their marketing strategy and their goals moving forwards. And obviously the choice of the CMS is a vital part of that. So the most common, common thing that I hear, MODX, I've never heard of it. So it's been going for 21 years. And for somebody that's actually been using it for at least the past 13, 14, 15 personally,

I was even surprised to read that, but it's been going since 2004 and in that time it's grown both in both reach and features. It does have a very, very loyal following of developers and agencies all around the world and I'm incredibly proud to say that I am one of those advocates for MODX. It's currently in its third major version and what that basically means is that it's had three major revisions over its life and those have brought in completely new designs, interfaces, and way of doing things.

But importantly, there's been 89 individual releases over this time. What that typically means is about three to four a year, and they are a blend of security patches and or usability updates. Why is that important? Well, that's important because that shows you their approach about continually maintaining, releasing updates and wanting to improve the system. That's a very, very important point. 

One fundamental element about MODX, which I adore, is that everything has been built from the ground up all around security. We're gonna talk a little bit more about this later on, but there is a real and genuine attitude from the core team that makes these updates and the team that contributes to MODX that everything should be based around great security and radiate out from there. It's at the forefront, the way that they talk about it, the way that they educate people about it, the way the system's been built, security is right at the centre.

And finally, one of the best pieces about MODX is actually one of its straplines, creative freedom. Now, it's much more than just a strapline because what it encompasses is so very, very vast. We may think in the scope of this that creativity comes from website design. Well, that's true, but there's also content. How can we be creative with the content that we write? How it's presented, how it's constructed, you know, all of these things. We've never met anything in MODX that can't be achieved and it's because of one of these fundamental principles. It empowers you to do everything through creative freedom.

So, onto our first main topic of conversation. The here and the now versus what's next. And I want to start with a statement which might be a little bit against the grain for some people. So, we've been making solutions, as I said, for 13 years and one of my observations is that it is easy for anybody to make a solution which is great for the here and the now. We see the mass televised advertising from places like Ionis, GoDaddy, all that lot. And what they do is they just show you a website and they say normally around a motivator on price, it's really easy for you to have a website up and running. The same is there for many other content management systems. You can get a theme, you can make it really, really quickly and really, really easy. So this is where this comes from.

I do believe it's very easy to make a solution in the here and the now. But the question is what's next? And here's a couple of real-world examples for you. If we've had a site made and we want to add a feature to it, how much is that going to cost? So normally it's very easy and quick to template up a website, but when you want to start to make it yours, you want to extend and you want to add something, and then you go into the realms of tweaking and adjusting, what does that cost look like?

Often it's a surprise to people that this piece of logic over here might cost considerably more than the initial project. Another thing that's valuable to organisations is time. How long is this going to take? Again, if we're tweaking, we're updating, we're changing things, it might take more time either in the here and now or supporting it moving forwards. And finally, the talent. If we've used a freelancer or we've had something done in-house and that person's moved on, is the talent available to efficiently create that, reliably create that moving forwards? All three of those are things that constantly come up when we've spoken to people about their previous experience about developing things.

So this is where MODX comes in. Its fundamental approach is different to how things are done. Now, I'm going to be completely honest with everybody watching this webinar. Websites in MODX typically take longer to develop at the beginning, but after that beginning investment in both time and cost, the reliability of the solution for medium to long term is where it really pays dividends.

So what I've done is I've basically put four very, very key elements here, which I'd like to share with you. The first is that anybody that has to do any form of administration on their content management system will know that when it comes to updating something, it can be a scary time. Let's take some backups, let's inform the business, let's make sure that we've got some time in our schedule should anything go wrong.

So, MODX is fundamentally different. You can update through the visual builders, you can even update through a command line. There's even tools out there to batch update multiple websites at the same time if you want to. But the ability to be able to update within reason, of course, if you go from one version to 20 in the future, you of course want to test. In our experience updating MODX, it's very, very simple, very, very easy to do.

The second big one is extras. So in many other content management systems, we have this idea of plugins. And what plugins provide are normally end-to-end functionality. So for the purposes of explaining it, let's just say that we've got a slider on the front end of a website. There's many things that go into making a slider, but if you install a plugin, it will normally give you the admin interface, it will give you how the slider actually works, it will then give you the presentation on the front end. It may well also install various libraries and stuff for you.

Now there's a lot of stuff going on there, but in this world where we need to have clean websites, chances are there's going to be loads of code bloat in the background. But equally, when you want to start tweaking it and changing it to your needs, that's when things can start to become a little bit awkward to maintain moving forwards. I'm sure many of us out there have installed a plugin. We've made it ours. We've then seemingly gone and updated that plugin and then all of our changes are gone. And they might be gone for some plugins, they might for others. Developers do things in different ways, we just don't know.

MODX is different. MODX provides us with the base functionality to build upon. So say for example, the slider example. The extra that you would install, something called either Get Resources or PDO tools, would give you the ability to fetch content in a secure, reliable way. And then how you present that to the front end is down to your developer. So what does that mean? Well, we only include the libraries that we need. We configure it how we want it to be, and we present it with all of the styles in a JavaScript, for example, that only we want. It makes it much more efficient and equally much more in control for the here and now and moving forward.

Third, headless. So what does that actually mean? So it basically means that you can do anything. The backend can be disconnected from the front end. You can use it for websites. You can use it for mobile applications. You can use it for data warehouses in the middle. You can use it for absolutely anything. Programming in MODX is an absolute joy. MODX API built on XPDO. It's really simple, easy to use, but also limitless within reason.

And as I just touched on, it's incredibly versatile. We've used it for so many different things. One key project we're working on at the moment is we're making some digital interactive boards inside a couple of hospices that we work on where users can go up, they can touch and they can move stuff around. Why are we doing it in MODX? Well, they're making blog articles, event pages, they go on their website. It can automatically flow nicely through into those boards that we're creating for them there, reducing administration time.

So, MODX, built for what's next. Security. So if there's any kind of stat or takeaway that I would like people to take from the webinar today, it's going to be over these next three slides. So, one of the most common things I've heard, and I've mentioned it already, is I've not heard of it. So, what that seemingly means is that link is, can't trust it. So, I've been very careful with how I've acquired the following pieces of data and I've got them from two trusted sources worldwide. The National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Vulnerability Database. And before I show this to you, I've got links in this for you to go and look at and do everything. So let's just be really, really clear on what I said on the previous slide. I've never heard of it, so I can't trust it yet. I've pulled a wide section of data here from 2014 up until the current.

And I've also picked two of the biggest content management systems out there. So content management systems, Joomla, WordPress, and MODX. Since 2014, worldwide reported common vulnerabilities and exposures. Joomla, 915. WordPress, 906. MODX, 8. So when we look at that statement of I've not heard of it, I can't trust it, and then we look at the data behind it, well, I have heard of it, so I can trust it, so it must be okay to have all these vulnerabilities, just doesn't make sense. And this is unbiased, factually recorded data.

Now, the critics amongst us may well be like, well, MODX, hardly anybody's using MODX compared to Joomla and to WordPress. So, you know, this data can't be right. Well, let's just go back to one of my first slides, you know, all about how MODX is made with security from the ground up. The way that some of the extras are made, some of the ways which the architecture is built on those two systems by definition makes it vulnerable.

Now another thing about making a system vulnerable is the amount of people that use it. But another key element is knowing what it's made in. So without getting too completely technical, MODX does not expose what it's made in. There's these things that are called headers, which computers can read from one another. Whenever you boot up most content management systems, it's very, very easy to see this website has been made in WordPress, this website has been made in Joomla, etc. MODX doesn't do that.

So when we now think about computer bots with malicious intent, and they can read automatically, programmatically a header, they know exactly where to go to the administration folder. They know exactly where to go into the folder where the extras would be installed and then run their malicious code. And then obviously have bad consequences on your website.

So when people say to me, I've not heard of MODX and I can't trust it, I actually think that because you haven't heard of MODX, that's actually one of its greatest strengths. And then I go into the form of, you know, it's been going for 20 plus years, it's in a major revision, it's had 89 continual updates, it's got security baked into it. And that normally is enough to get people to at least want to explore the content management system. So let's now just flip this from not just in terms of a system, in terms of how we build our websites, but let's now look at the benefits for administrators. So again, in our experience, what we found is that the people actually using these sites, spending the most amount of time in the content management system are normally the people that are not included in these decisions.

You know, at the beginning of a web project, developers are involved. Decision makers signing off cheques and things like that, they're involved, but not the actual people that are going to be spending most of their days in there adding content. So one of the biggest things, not only we at GEL take in approach to how we develop websites, but MODX enables us to do, is we can spend a lot of time making the administration interface work for that specific customer or even that specific person.

So what's the result of that? Well, it means that we can spend more time on what matters, a really, really simple mantra. We don't want to be going in with a visual editor and moving stuff around, pressing save, viewing it, going back in, tweaking around. One of the things that we're really proud of is our approach of decoupling the written word from the visual presentation.

When we do websites with clients and MODX enables us to do this, we have the view that you spend the time doing what you're best at and what we create through MODX will do all the rest for you. It's consistent. It sets that perfect tone. There are visual builders that you can use, which obviously can circumvent this, but this is all about, you know, if you have the capability to do it, should you be doing it? But that's one thing that we really like. That, by proxy, goes into then a right first time approach. I'm sure that if we were to do some pretty crude data, we could figure out how much time is actually spent correcting what's been written before, and I think it would be a lot.

Let's go into emotions now. Confidence. Confidence is a really, really big one. We want to be knowing that when people are using these sites, they're getting it right, they're sending it over to whomever to authorise, or it's going out in the world, and it's working. That confidence is going to build. That is exactly what we want. And it's worthwhile mentioning, that any of the clients which we've worked with in 13 years, which range from a startup entrepreneur, 16 year old, all the way to 92 year old, later in life, setting up a lifestyle business, have used MODX to gain confidence and quickly do what they need to do with the least amount of effort.

Faster, again, to implement what's needed most. And then a key one to be seen as more of an enabler. So let's just now go into the mindset of somebody which is a website administrator or a marketeer and they're in briefing meetings and ideas, strategic meetings and ideas are coming up and they're able to say yes more.

They're able to say yes we can do that. We're able to say yes we can get this developed on the site in a timely manner. You know, that's going to promote your reputation and image inside of your organisation or again for us as an agency relationships with our client without the cost, without the ums and the ahs, without the I'll get back to you later, or without the we'll go and do it and then we bill you extra for support, which is something unfortunately that's rife at the moment.

And one clear thing, removing the update fear. So you know, the stories about people, you as I said earlier, that will go in, they will press update, it will cataclysmically go wrong, either taking the site down or putting content on pages it shouldn't be or resetting sites, you know, that is just completely gone. So it's just a much more efficient, powerful approach to doing administration. So we just spent 20 minutes going through a couple of these key things. So in summary, look, in my opinion, if you haven't heard of it, that's one of its greatest strengths. There's a saying, security through obscurity. MODX is brilliant at that, but do not let that fool you. There are some fantastic sites out there that are built in MODX and lots of them on the official MODX site for you to be able to go and look at. Some of them are even made by us.

I do believe that if you are a startup on a budget, MODX might not be the right system for you. But if you are an organisation that maybe has had your first or your second website, you come along, come away with knowledge about the pain points that you've got and medium to long term, I do believe MODX is an absolutely brilliant fit for that.

I think the strength in security and the admin experience does result in savings to an organisation that had been previously out of reach. The time spent doing things right first-time, the ability to react quicker and get something out to market. As I said earlier, I'm pretty sure if there was some research done on these things, it would make a profound difference. Another one, a general, tangible asset to any business. So we've worked with quite a few organisations which have been dealing with either management buyouts or exits. The ability of the website to be a pillar in the form of its marketing strategy in the form of sales or knowledge has been of real benefit.

So those are some of the key summaries which I've got. And there's a little thing at the bottom there, which the marketing team obviously got me to put in there. And it's like, you know, if any of this stuff you're struggling with, you know, we can help you. We know some people that can help you. But I want to make it a little bit more specific. So one of the things from day one, as I said, we're a very proud ambassador of MODX is that I personally offer out free one hour consultations to anybody that's even thinking of MODX, be it a developer or a business owner or people that just need some support.

Don't need to be a client. There's no commitment, no nothing. I just welcome, you know, conversations about MODX and how it could help you and your organisation. Anything that we do for that, some people feel, you know, if we've sold something from them to support, any donations go towards our charity of the year. So there's also a little bit of good which goes on there as well.

Another product that we have, which I'm incredibly proud of is a day called the Zero to MODX Hero that again I offer. And that is taking a full stack dev, so competent in some form of JavaScript library, some form of compiled CSS library like Sass or Less or something like that, and HTML and taking those skills and applying them to MODX and the key’s in the title, it's a day, but you come out of that day not just being able to understand MODX, but actually being proficient at it.

So you could take a MODX website, reverse engineer how it's built, know exactly where to go to be able to edit something and away you go. So that's brilliant again for companies which have either inherited websites through acquisition or a system which has been put onto them. And finally, look, as I said, the community itself is incredibly active and immensely loyal. So there's a MODX community on their forums, so forums.community.modx.com. And there's also a Slack channel, which is free for anybody to join. There's often meetups all around the world. There's ski meetups. There's loads of stuff that goes on. As I said, it's an incredibly loyal base. And they welcome questions. So by all means, please sign up for that.

So we're going to go over to do some questions now. So what I'm going to do is just open up the chat. So here we go, that should now be enabled. So we'll just have a minute or two for questions if anybody wants to put some of those into the chat.

Okay, first question. Cool, good. How would GEL Studios manage the migration of an existing team from a content management system over to MODX? Great. So these are the sort of questions that I love. So these questions are all about people. So I mentioned this earlier about the word confidence. So how can we install confidence skills?

So the way that we do it at GEL is we believe from the very, very early stage of any prospect coming in, everybody should be involved. And there's a great opportunity there as a culture piece. So when we typically involve teams which are transitioning, that's where we ask those questions. What stuff are you struggling with at the moment? What stuff would make your day easier if you were in MODX and we build the stuff off of it?

Then what we do is we go through a series of targeted training. So we've got a series of videos which are on YouTube, which we ourselves make and continually update, going through lots of the common elements. So they're a really simple format, they're really easy to follow, only about two, three minutes each one. But the idea is anybody can have a look at how to administer those key functions. That's the first thing that we do.

The second thing that we then do when we've created the solution is we do customised bespoke face-to-face or remote training on that specific solution. We then record that, that becomes a tangible asset again, so if anybody else needs to be onboarded in the future, they can obviously have those things as well. We then have what I just shared with you earlier, you know, that free MODX consultation, which is available for anybody if they need, you know, a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more in depth, or equally if something else has been developed and they want to just explore what that looks like for them in any greater detail.

But above all else, for us, it's just being a champion of MODX. So, you know, look, we don't bill people excessively for training or if they pick up the phone and they have a question because we understand the link between somebody actually feeling vulnerable enough to pick up the phone and say, I don't know this, even more so if they've had a training session before and the link to being a strategic partner with them, delivering that training to them in a way that they understand and then seeing them go off and flourish with regards to using the MODX system.

So in summary, highly focused training which is unique to the individual and then check-ins. It's all about relationships. It's a great question. Have any more come through? The future of MODX, what do you see? That's a good one. You know, the problem with the content management community at the moment is they always look towards the latest and greatest. And actually one of the toughest things to do is to be really, really strict in what you do introduce.

So this is where I said, the loyal community is really important to MODX because, you know, we have the ability to extend stuff. Should that be part of the core, which is, as I said, in those three versions and then the updates to it or not. It's governed very, very strictly at the moment, but one of the best things, if I go right back to the beginning, is creative freedom.

So we've seen ideas over the years which have been raised and effectively they've not gone into the core because either they've needed to go through a longer process to get it in there or whatnot, but then it's been created by the community and then made available, so for you to use. It's very much going, the future is very much going to be community led. You know, what do people want? How do they want it to be? And this is why, you know, there is a little bit of that vicious circle — I haven't heard of MODX, so why would I use it? But then we need people to know about it because we need them to contribute to the community.

I envisage the future of MODX being stable. The next best thing, who knows what it is yet? We don't know yet. But what I do know is when you look at, say, for example, WordPress, which released that, I think it was a Gutenberg editor two or three years ago, it was seen as the next best thing, but all it was was a visual builder, really. It didn't really change anything behind the scenes. It was just a new way of doing visual building, which is just a visual builder. There's loads of them out there. So, you know, what was the purpose behind it?

Okay, so I'm a bit of a stickler for the time. 30 minutes on the dot, pretty happy about that. So let me just come back to sharing the screen so we can just come back. Okey dokey. So we've got a couple more webinars coming up. We've got the smarter Google Ads strategies for better results with Lewis on the 30th of July. We've got our very own Alicia running a What is a Brand? It's more than just the logo. That's going to be a really, really good one on the 6th of August.

The power of thought leadership. Every person has knowledge to share. That's going to be a really, really good one by Beth. I'm going to tune into that one myself on the 13th of August. Look forward to that one. And then David, our head of sales is going to be running From Clicks to Customers, turning marketing into sales. I really look forward to that one as well.

All of that information is not only on our website, it will be on our socials and we'll put something in the email sending out to you guys with a copy of this session as well.

And finally, just thank you. Thank you for taking time out of your day, your lunch to come along and listen to me speak about ModX. If you do want to know more, that is a genuine offer, okay? Book some time in with me. I've put a link on there which is clickable to go straight to my diary. I welcome any conversations about MODX and what I really like is I really like the tough chats.

So if anybody's got some really, really tough questions that they'd like to throw at me, you know, over a virtual coffee, or equally welcome to come by our studios here in Swindon, then please do come by. So thank you ever so much for your time. Look forward to speaking to some of you soon. And as I said, I hope that the goal for today is that you can go off and you can start to explore MODX. Thank you very much.