Over a month ago the first MODX Community online event for 2021 took place. Focused on the ever awaiting release of MODX3, it allowed the community to directly ask questions to MODX core integrators and get a feeling for what UX improvements will be coming to the MODX3 Manager. This is the summary of the event that was promised on MODX's Slack Channel. Let's find out what results came out of this group effort by the agencies Pixmill, SEDA.digital, Sterc and with lots of help from modmore, Oliver Haase-Lobinger and Ivan Bochkarev.
For those that couldn't attend, here is a short summary
Thursday, March 4th:
The first presentation was by Ryan Thrash, CEO of the MODX, LLC. He presented what improvements were coming to bring transparency to the community. One major change is the introduction of a new Github Project Board. Check it out here: https://github.com/orgs/modxcms/projects/1
Joshua Lückers presented some highlights coming to MODX3 for developers. Afterwards we had a live Q&A with him and Thomas Jakobi, both being core integrators in the project.
The last presentation was from Gauke Sietzema from Sterc, whose focus was showing new UI/UX improvements in the MODX3 Manager.
Before, during and after these talks, all members were encouraged to gather at gather.town where we organized an online Speakeasy room. Here, using video chat, all participants could walk around and hold conversations almost as in real life!
Friday, March 5th:
The very next day we initiated a Bughunt whereby again the focus was on MODX3. The plan was to try to motivate the online community to contribute to the development of MODX3 by fixing issues and testing the new version of the software. Bounties for specific problems and bugs were distributed out over all individual issues that were in the MODX3 list. Testing of important MODX Extras were also on the table.
Oliver Hasse-lobinger gave us an engaging argument as for why we should consider crowdsourcing the MODX project and also showed us a practical way that we could achieve this via the Open Collective Community: https://opencollective.com/
What were the results?
For the event itself we had over 180 participants from almost every continent on the planet! We also raised 4.650 Euros in sponsoring money.
Overall Experience
According to the survey that we sent after the event, most people were overall satisfied with 51.9% saying it was excellent, 40.7% saying it was good, and 7.4% saying it was fair.
Regarding crowdsourcing, the majority of participants feel that we should investigate this idea further.
As a result of our event, serious steps are now underway in creating a MODX Open Collective community. Through this, funding of MODX code issues and feature requests will no longer only take place at Bughunt events. This may be the push that gets MODX development moving quickly. Stay tuned for more news on this!
As far as the Bughunt goes:
- 41 Pull Requests were created. 34 were closed and merged. The 7 that are open are waiting for review
- 19 new bugs were added. 12 were checked and fixed or marked as already fixed.
Feedback from the MODX integrators was also positive. They are happy that the community showed new energy and drive to make this next release a reality. Here are some more details:
MODX 3 Bounty Top 5 results:
- Ivan Boschkarev - 907,66 Euro
- Jako - 317,14 Euro
- Digitalpenguin - 169,50 Euro
- Joeke - 164,04 Euro
- culd_steffan - 131,23 Euro
The rest of the bounty results can be found here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c7knqTK0yyCll-TpqtmKSdzDXj-9QlGyN5FUCvSG_fE
MODX3S Bounty results from Sterc
MODX3S is the result of the MODX3 project from 2018. It contains the full redesign and UX improvements, but doesn't have the full core-rewrite. In other words: it's MODX 2 with the redesign, as was the plan for MODX3. MODX3S also contains all security fixes from the latest 2.8.* version. You can download it here.
We tested upgrading MODX3S to the latest MODX3-build during the bug hunt and everything worked without any issues. This is great news, because it means you can get all the MODX3S juice right now, without worrying about the future update to MODX3, when it gets finished.
- Sergey Shlokov: 100 Euro
- Ilya Utkin: 200 Euro
- Murray Wood: 100 Euro
- Bruno Perner: 100 Euro
Vi.to for a year
SEDA.digital has paid for a year subscription to Vi.to to ensure that the event won‘t get lost until we have another archiving place.
The videos are also planned to be posted on the MODX Bug Hunt YouTube channel.
Let's not stop here!
We‘d like to that everyone for participating! We encourage more people to get involved and host online Meetups and Bughunts of their own. If you would like to do so and don‘t know where to start, or wish to help us organize more events, ping us in the snowup channel in Slack!
Stay healthy, motivated and optimistic!
-Your MODX SnowUp Team!