ManagerManager for ModX

Background

One of the problems with many CMSs is that they are designed by developers, and their administration is not user friendly for the average content editor to use.

As heavy users of ModX CMS 1.x, we often wanted to simplify the fields that were available to users - for example to hide or rename some of the more technical fields. To do this would have meant hacking the core, which in turn would prove to be a nightmare for future upgrades and maintainability.

To solve this problem I developed ManagerManager - a plugin which, as it suggests, allows you to manage the manager.

Features

Using the system's plugin framework, I designed a system which allows changes to be applied based on sophisticated rules (e.g. only specific roles, on specific templates). As it has matured, virtually every field of the document editor can be hidden, renamed, or moved; new tabs can be created; the inbuilt help and tooltips can be modified, new field types (e.g. tags, colours) added, images previewed and more. It even has a plugin framework of its own, so new actions and widgets can be created using a unified coding stucture.

The plugin proved immensly popular (>13,000 downloads as of March 2011), as was eventually incorporated into the main codebase. Recognising the importance of customising things for managers as well as end users, similar functionality was built into 2.x (Revolution) version of the system.

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