A fresh, albeit slightly belated collection of news about MODX. In the news: the long-awaited refactoring from Jason, a few words about the meetup in Amsterdam, the new modx.com site, as well as updates to add-ons, news and notes.

Enjoy reading!

The author of this digest was ill last week, so the release of the digest had to be postponed. Because of this, I would appreciate any help in preparing the next releases on time.

News and Events

Meetup in Amsterdam

The Meetup in Amsterdam took place. Some people told me that there were a lot of presenting of own tools and extras instead of MODX itself but also there were a lot of conversation between speeches and after the official part that was not visible through live stream. As a result there were made some defining decisions about future MODX.

The performances themselves can be viewed in the recordings of the broadcast (link below), and you can listen to my impressions and thoughts in the third issue of the modcast, which is expected to be released on Monday, because of the illness it was not possible to record earlier.

New modx.com

Just a couple of days before the meetup in Amsterdam, the MODX LLC team rolled out an updated website — modx.com. This time, the changes affected not only the marketing pages, but also the forum and the section with additions. It has some minor bugs, but it looks nicer, especially the section with extras.

Instead of the old forum, a new one — community.modx.com has also launched. It's based on a modern forum engine that simply works. We have long had one in the form of a section with questions on modx.pro, and now the English version is better as well. The old forum has been archived and cannot be posted to.

Nightly 3.x builds

I started the nightly build service in a hurry before the meetup and made a simple mistake of not specifying the full path to composer in the build. This led to the fact that in the manual mode, everything was going well, but cron did not know where to find composer and collected the release without dependencies, which many complained about.

I fixed everything, corrected the scripts, now everything is going well, you can download, install and test. https://nightly.modx.by/

MODX Development

I must say that despite the code freeze due to the expectation of code from Jason, the activity after the meetup increased slightly. So far not so much in terms of code as in terms of interest in the process and questions, on where to start. And in addition to developing a lot of work, there are a lot of sorting issues, work on documentation and just testing the work already done.

After the meetup, Igor Sukhinin and Sergey Fedorov joined the team. Igor is known as the creator of the site modx.ru.

To help, come to the Russian-language chat in Telegram or to the general channel on Slack.

GitHub News

  • #14534 — long-awaited pull request with refactoring from Jason. There is still a lot of work, you can help to convert the processors and complete other tasks on it, but there is already code to touch and, moreover, you can send your improvements to it.
  • #14507 — I have plans to rewrite the installer as a whole, but Ivan Bochkarev decided, as long as it was, to bring the current pages of the installer into a single design. The link can follow the progress.
  • #14511 — fix widget with latest edited resources. Now it shows the correct information. Thanks Yana!
  • #14510 — another improvement of the same widget, but now the problem with dates and time of editing is solved.
  • #14532 — it turned out that there is a bug when deleting admin menu items, when only the item itself is deleted, and all the nested ones remain and when you need to add a new item, you can catch the unpleasant error that the menu item is already there, but it is not visible. Now the menu items will be deleted with all nested items, so be careful when deleting any item at the top.
  • #14527 — there is a discussion on how best to implement the addition of async and defer attributes to scripts that are connected using MODX via the regClientScript method.
  • #14526 — autocomplete fields function in the browser is useful, but sometimes annoying with its obsession and as a result it was suggested to add a system setting that allows, if necessary, to disable autocomplete in the fields in the admin area. Saving a couple of kilometers of nerve fibers.

Interesting notes and articles

New and updated addons

  • ThemeBulma-1.0.0-beta — A new addition from Artem Burkun with a site template that is based on the Bulma CSS framework. Bulma CSS framework is based on flexbox and makes it easy to use markup for any type of device, it can act as an alternative to Bootstrap, but without javascript components.
  • TurboPages-1.0.1-pl — The first addition of Egor Levin in the marketplace. An extension with which you can create an RSS feed that matches the requirements of Yandex's turbo pages. The main features of the plugin: supports setting and displaying a search, displaying menus, widgets, feedback forms, various buttons (email, phone, etc.), advertising blocks, analytics systems, and so on.
  • jwtSession-1.0.1-pl — component of Vasily Naumkin. It is an experimental add-on that places the server-side PHP session of the user in his own browser, in cookies. This allows you to save disk space on the server for the visited sites and not to make unnecessary queries to the database. Not yet recommended for production sites - need to be tested. In the past digest, a post was mentioned describing how it all works.
  • UserTest-4.1.0-beta — component for user testing - continues to improve. In the new version added:
    — Made separate tables of questions and test results. They can now be attached to multiple tests simultaneously. Now you do not need to do a bunch of duplicate questions and results.
    — Manage the order of answers and output answers in random order.
    — Validation of answers to a question. If the tick "answer is required" is checked, the user will have to answer the question before moving on to the following questions.
    — Cleaning invitations.
    — Crontab-based notification of not passed test for the invited user. - When you go to a new test page, scroll to the top of the page.
  • Quiz-1.1.4-pl — bug fixes and improvements, the most important of which is support for OpenGraph and, therefore, improved display of quiz links in social networks.
  • Commerce-1.0.0-rc3 — a great update of the e-commerce solution from Mark Hamstra, which he presented at the meeting in Amsterdam.
  • Following were some Commerce plugins updated — Formula Shipping for Commerce, Mailchimp API for Commerce, Print Order for Commerce & GuestOrderView for Commerce.

Thanks for attention!

If you noticed a mistake  —  please write to me.

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