...to seek out new life and new civilizations

This CMS got installed without any problem. I also installed the "sample site" to have something to start from.

The only role created by the installation procedure is "administrator". Before creating a user, a role must be created as it is required in the "new user" form (unless another user with administrator permissions is going to be created).

Content creation is not so easy. The document page is full of options and their meaning is not always clear. Content positioning is not easy. Some other CMS give you the chance to put a block up on the left, or down on the right. MODx seems to have a more complicated (and probably more flexible, I don't know) way of doing that. The result is that I had a lot of trouble to make a document appear where I wanted.

There is a nice feature: for every page an alias name can be specified that can be used as part of the URL (if the CMS is properly configured). This way it is possibile to have a page about CMS having somewhere in its URL the string "whatever-you-like", which helps to have pages indexed by search engines.

I tried to install the SMF forum but was not able to complete the operation. The installation went all right but I was not able to configure the module "SMF Connector", when I ran the module I got an error saying "unable to load SMF settings [...]". I didn't feel like investigating the problem...

The default installation has four templates but only the default one is nice. On the MODs site there are some more templates, I downloaded one named "Andreas01 Template" an read its install.txt: the procedure doesn't look to be user friendly, I read about "cut and pasting" things here and there and I got scared. I didn't try to install it.

Conclusion:

It looks to be a good CMS but I didn't find it user friendly at all. It sounds to be very well customizable but it requires too much work to be used in what I call the "basic" scenario.

Overall rating: decent