create a content-only page for mobile news feed in modx

Question

I've been tasked with providing the backend for a news feed that will be used by our company apps. The feed will pull articles from our current website, which is built with ModX (evolution). So far, I've designed the feed to send JSON through a specified url containing the needed information. It's currently in the following format (using Ditto placeholders):

{
  "title":"[+longtitle+]",
  "description":"[+description+]",
  "link":"[(site_url)][~[+id+]~]"
},

Here's my issue - the link I'm providing through the JSON (in the link tag) opens the full, desktop version of the page. Our current site is not responsive, and was not originally designed to handle mobile devices. We would like to open a small, clean page showing ONLY the ['content'] of that particular article. I'm looking for a way to link to a page showing only this content - no header, no footer, nothing.

I know that I could create a new page to handle all of this, but it needs to be dynamic. New articles are created regularly, and I'd like to avoid having to add another page to handle this for every article, while also making it simple for the writing team to integrate this feature.

One of my ideas so far is:

• Pass a GET parameter to the URL "link" in the JSON - something like - www.mysite.com/article1?contentOnly=true. Then, in my article, detect this parameter in PHP and handle accordingly. I would need this snippet on each article written, so it may cause issues down the road if our staff writers forget to add it.

I haven't worked with ModX long, so I'm assuming there's a better way to handle this. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Please let me know if I need to provide more information.

Answer 1

I am not 100 % sure how you have done this, but here's my tip.

Don't use the resource itself to output the JSON. Doing this based on a GET-paramter will required the entire site to be uncached. Instead, use a single resource for the feed and supply the id/permalink there.

For example: mysite.com/feed?id=1, mysite.com/feed?latest or something like that.

Done this way, you could have an empty template with just the snippet that is parsing to JSON in it. This has to be uncached of course, but the rest of the site could be cached as normal.