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MODX Digest #4, April 22 – May 13, 2019

Latest news about MODX for the last 3 weeks. In the episode: renewal of MAB meetings, all processors were converted to a new format, active work on refactoring and docs, updating add-ons and interesting notes.

The episode is covering 3 weeks, as in Belarus were long public holidays, which I spent with pleasure with the family, so do not blame me for a short delay. Moreover, the episode turned out to be more interesting.

Enjoy reading!

Thanks a lot to Mark Hamstra for supporting me and my work (Patreon).

News and Events

MAB (MODX Advisory Board) started working again and in a new format. Three meetings have already been held, there are no more strict rules and stupid restrictions, and the group’s work is aimed at achieving actual results while maintaining absolute openness and transparency.

MODX Development

Documentation

According to the documentation, for now, solved 13 issues.

  • Work continues to correct broken links, to translate documentation into Russian, to improve the appearance of the site itself. Soon it will be possible to switch the documentation language through the interface.
  • All images and screenshots are synchronized with notes, and work has begun on updating outdated images.
  • Ivan Bochkarev transferred the documentation for pdoTools on English, and he also has plans to transfer the documentation for miniShop2 and Tickets.
  • Liam Franklin was actively involved in the work, he rewrote several important sections on installation, using the MODX tag syntax, and template building. This is important work, as part of the documentation describes very outdated things and we need to put everything in order.
  • Mark Hamstra did a thorough search through the documentation. So far, without using special services or applications that will help improve the relevance of the results, but you can already use it.

Also, Mark regularly posts updates on the special topic on the community forum, feel free to follow it there.

Refactoring

Work on refactoring continues, and thanks to the efforts of Joshua, Jason and myself, all processors have been converted to the new format. Here you can see the results of the work.

Jason then deleted the old models and now work is being done to make the new code work. To do this, you need to rewrite some points with the connection of the classes in the old style, update the model for MSSQL and probably add support for Postgres (in xPDO 3.0 it already exists). There is still a lot of work, but there is progress.

News from GitHub

  • #14558 – the discussion of the removal of unnecessary full-text index proposed by Sergey Shlokov is still ongoing. Need your opinion.
  • #14488 – now MODX 3 will work only on PHP 7.0+.
  • #14571 – the guys from Sterc, with good intentions, offered to add several useful widgets, one of which is a help widget for key combinations that are supported in the MODX manager area.
  • #14578 – Sander proposed to slightly improve the appearance of the user profile, but Bakha did the same thing (#14420)! This shows that communication needs to be improved between the participants in the development. It turns out a little in the chat in Telegram, but we need to transfer this experience to the English-speaking community.
  • #14581 – Ruslan Aleev suggested make the value of the Name field in the tables be a link to the entity, but there are issues that need discussion from the community.
  • #14569 – in the original design layout of the new third version, there was such a widget and Sander decided to implement it in the code. However, I am not very happy about this, because, as with the Help widget, such widgets would be very good to put together in a separate package, which could be offered as one of the starting ones. The reason is to do not litter already so big source code. This is all we need to maintain further, but there is not much time and people.
  • #14507 – Ivan Bochkarev completed the work on the updated look of the installer for MODX 3. This PR is ready for testing and review. All the old styles and images were cut out, the template was done in accordance with the design provided earlier.

Interesting notes and articles

  • [ru] Creating tables through MIGX – Mikhail Electricov described a trivial way to create own table in MODX using the MIGX component. This method is even faster than dealing with modExtra.
  • [en] MODX setup/ Directory Site Exploit – a couple of weeks ago, a new wave of hacking attempts took place through the left setup folder and the MODX team wrote instructions on how to deal with it.
  • [en] MAB relaunch – on April 25, a meeting of the updated MAB group took place, a group of people who are not indifferent to MODX and who are ready to take responsibility for its development. In the notes the results of the first meeting.
  • [en] The second meeting of MAB – on May 2, the second “extended” meeting took place, at which the main topic was a discussion of the roadmap of MODX 3 and MODX as a whole. The results were interesting.
  • [ru] Removing drafts on modx.pro – upon requests from the users, Vasily Naumkin added the ability to delete drafts to the authors. A trifle that has long been missing.
  • [ru] MODX. Request Management – Sergey Shlokov analyzed in detail the mechanism for processing incoming requests in MODX. Carefully, in the video the digging in the MODX guts, it can hurt. :)

New and updated add-ons

  • Boilerplate-1.0.5-pl – Aleksandr Huz presented his new free component, which is the initial basic version of the site, with pre-installed add-ons and settings. Can save time. A detailed list of all the entities and actions of the component is given in a note in the communityRU.
  • ReachGoal-1.0.0-beta – in all visitor accounting services, it has long been possible to track goals (clicks, actions). Mikhail Tyrsyna has published a componentRU that allows you to create such goals directly from the MODX manager.
  • ClientSupport-1.1.0 – the Sterc team has updated its component, which allows you to send a request for support directly from the manager. The new version adds the ability to customize the icon for the button, as well as improved compatibility with MODX 3.
  • Personalize-3.7.2 – Bob Ray has updated his simple component, which can show different chunks depending on whether the user is logged in or not. In the new version, bugs were fixed and a fallback was added in case there is no full username. In this case, the username field is used.
  • siteStatistics-2.3.0-pl – Sergey Shlokov updated his component to collect statistics on visits to the site pages. From changesRU – a tab with statistics directly on the resource page and search by users in the management of statistics.
  • FormDataManager-1.3.9 – updated component for managing data that was received by filling out forms on the site. Many improvements in the code, refactoring of processors, improved the handling of dates, both in the interface and in import/export operations, a special snippet for CRON tasks has been added.


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Version of MODX Digest #5 on Russian language.

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