The Malta meetup was the first meetup for us in the Mediterranean, which means meeting new people and hearing new opinions and ideas about MODX. The focus of the meetup was to improve the MODX user experience. The decision to focus on one theme made it a very successful meetup!

Malta is a small island in the middle of the Mediterranean. This gives it a very strategical position. A lot of powers have ruled the country in the past, including the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Moors, Normans, Sicilians, Spanish, Knights of St. John, French and British. You'll see a lot of references to these nations on historical spots. Today, Malta is an independent country and has a population of 450.000 very proud, kind and helpful people. Best of all: it has a MODX community!

Sterc was invited to the Malta meetup by Steven James McLean, Malta's MODX community frontrunner. This meetup was different from other meetups. We wanted it to be a full day meetup where people from all MODX-skill levels could participate, from their own area of expertise. This included developers, designers, strategists, marketeers, MODX users and four MAB members. All these people spent their time on the central theme: The Ultimate CMS Interface.

The meetup day was preceded by the Hotjar XAwards, which we were invited for. Hotjar is an all-in-one analytics and feedback tool for websites and applications. The MODX Manager Working group uses the "Recordings"-feature to record user-sessions in order to get a good understanding about MODX-usage by end-users. The XAwards were about the best web and native digital experiences at the 'early startup' stage. It was a very entertaining evening at the beautiful Villa Rosa venue in St. Julian's.

The MODX Meetup started at 9am on the next day at Hotel Valentina. It was attended by 25 people, including 10 students from the NHL University of Applied Sciences, Communication & Multimedia Design, who had a one-week study-trip to Malta. Most of the NHL-students had no experience with MODX, which made their opinion and first-time experiences with MODX very valuable.

The day kicked off with a short intro to MODX by Steven James McLean and Gauke Pieter Sietzema, followed by the forming of groups. Each group had their own topic to work on, which resulted in a lot of new findings and ideas for MODX. All meetup results are summarised here. These results may or may not find its way into MODX.

We finished off a very successful MODX weekend with a barbecue at Golden Bay, Sandy Beach on Sunday. It was a magnificent location: live music, 25 degrees celsius (77 degrees Fahrenheit), good food, refreshing beers, a beautiful sunset and wonderful MODX people.