MODX.today is the new MODX community podcast. Pioneers. Changing the game. 

The host in this episode is Chris Cherrett (intro @ 00:01:30).

The guests on this show:

• Menno Pietersen (intro @ 00:00:50)
• Mat Jones (intro @ 00:02:20)
• Yee Jee Tso (intro @ 00:03:35)

It started with a tweet! The goal is to spread MODX and to share great knowledge regularly. 

The name MODX.today comes from an idea in the pipeline at modmore, for an editorial/magazine style website about MODX. This was a great fit with the idea of a podcast.

The new ambassadors program is a collaborative effort from Yee Jee and John at MODX to reinvent the ambassadors program. The goal has always been to solicit help from the community and to grow MODX, but there are now minimum levels of activity. 

Ambassadors are now invited into a Slack channel on the MODX Team Chat to stay "in the know" with the team. 

It's a user-centric podcast, so if anyone is listening, please send in your questions and what you'd like to hear about! New guests and topics are always welcome to join the podcast. Tweet @MODXtoday or one of the hosts/guests.

Expecting about 5 or 10 people to join the ambassadors, the initial feedback to the program blew the team away with over 70 ambassadors committing to the new requirements. 

Extras.io provides premium extras as well as free package providers. Their first extra, Preview, was first shown at the MODX Weekend and makes it possible to write drafts and see it side by side with the current live version. This feature is very important to certain businesses, making it possible to use MODX for businesses that need this ability to preview changes.

• SeoPro by Sterc: provides a nifty way of previewing how pages will look in Google
• modDevTools by argnist: provides a way to edit chunks used in a template, from the template view.

MySQL Cache uses a MySQL table to cache data, instead of putting stuff in the filesystem. The short answer to Christian's questions is no, it does not help performance for simple projects on a single server. 

However it does help when working on a high availability / replicated / load balanced environment with a separate database server, such as the one talked about by Mark Willis at the MODX Weekend. On a multi-server environment, the default file cache can be ineffective because the cache is per server, and memcached needs to be set up with unique ports for each cache partition per site, which is quite tedious for platforms with many sites. In this multi-server environment, no matter what server your request is being handled by, MySQL Cache will have a warm cache and it helps performance there.

MODX is not "stuck" on 5.2, as it works fine on more recent versions of PHP, but it's good that it does work with older version when working with other systems that may not be up to date, or if the user is not on the latest and greatest hardware/software.

Semantic versioning is important as it communicates when updates are expected to break behaviour.

Aside from Git, people are also using Teleport to create and inject packages. 

The winner is... Christian Seel!

Thank you for listening.