Bob Ray has been a well-known MODX contributor for a long time, and with SiteCheck he has put a lot of his knowledge and experience into a single extra. SiteCheck analyses your entire MODX site, trying to find common and not-so-common issues and it provides you with a list of what needs to be fixed. If you want to, it can also correct a lot of these issues automatically.

How does it work?

SiteCheck can be used in two ways. The most typical way is probably running it within the manager through the component. But as it is meant to be used for diagnosing issues, and your manager might not be working completely when you have issues, it can also be executed as a standalone PHP file. 

Either way, it works the same. It has a lot of tests that will run, analyzing your configuration and database. If it finds an issue, it shows that in the report provided at the end of the processing. When you enable the fix option, for a large number of common issues it will also attempt to fix them - after creating a backup, of course. It will also provide information about the issue, and instructions to fix them manually.

What does it check?

Tons of stuff!

Here's an incomplete list, as retrieved from the official site on May 11th 2015:

  • Missing MODX config files
  • Invalid paths in config files
  • Invalid URLs in config files
  • Incorrect file and directory permissions
  • Inability to connect to the MODX database
  • Character set mismatches between MODX and MySQL
  • An invalid workspace path
  • A Date/Time mismatch between PHP and MySQL
  • Invalid Transport Packages
  • Resources with invalid parents
  • Resources with invalid Templates
  • Resources with empty aliases
  • Resources with duplicate aliases in the same Context
  • Resources with empty URIs
  • Resources with duplicate URIs in the same Context
  • Resources with duplicate pagetitles in the same Context
  • Resources with invalid class keys
  • Resources with invalid Contexts
  • Elements with invalid Categories
  • Elements with invalid Property Sets
  • Templates with invalid Template Variables
  • Template Variables with invalid templates
  • Template Variables with invalid Resource Groups
  • Resource Groups with invalid Template Variables
  • Resource Groups with invalid Resources
  • Resources with invalid Resource Groups
  • Users with invalid User Groups
  • Users with invalid Roles
  • User Groups with invalid Users
  • User Groups with invalid Roles
  • Plugins with invalid Events
  • Events attached to invalid Plugins
  • Property Sets attached to invalid Elements

Even if you're not having issues at the moment, running SiteCheck to make sure all of the above (and more!) is taken care of is pretty amazing. Checking all of that manually would be a lot of work, while with SiteCheck it takes less time than it does walking to the kitchen and making a cup of coffee.

So where do I get this awesome?

SiteCheck is available from Bob's Guides. That's also where you can find installation and usage instructions.

It costs $25 for one-time, unlimited site license for one person. That's a ridiculous good value for having a large chunk of Bob Ray's experience debugging issues, condensed into a 108kb zip file you can use forever.