MODX Digest # 3 (March 25 - April 8, 2019)

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

Enjoy reading!

The author of this digest was so well ill last week, so the release of the digest had to be postponed until the time of solving health problems. Because of this, I will not give up any help in preparing the next releases in order to be on time.

News and Events

Mitap in Amsterdam

Mitap in Amsterdam took place. I will not say that he was directly successful, although after my report of a raging and discussion in the audience and after, in the lobby of the hotel, they were very active, apparently it was a living start. The performances themselves can be viewed in the recordings of the broadcast (link below), and 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 mitzp in Amsterdam, the MODX LLC team rolled out an updated website - modx.com . This time, the changes affected not only the pages with marketing texts, but also the forum and the section with additions. With minor bugs, but it looks nicer, especially the section with additions.

Instead of the old forum, a new one - community.modx.com is now launched. Of the benefits, this is a normal, relatively modern forum engine that develops and simply works. We have long had one in the form of a section with questions on modx.pro, now the English version. Of the minuses - the old forum has sunk into oblivion, the posts could not stand, and there, too, there was sometimes very interesting information.

Nightly builds

I started the nightly build service in a hurry before the mitap and made a banal and simple mistake without specifying the full path to the composer in the configuration of the collector. This led to the fact that in the manual mode, everything was going well, but cron did not know where to take the composer and collected the release without dependencies, which many complained about. As a result, 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 mitap increased slightly. So far not so much in terms of code as in terms of interest in the process and questions, 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.

In addition, Marc is ready to launch a new REST API for MODX, which will allow him to refuse in the future, including ExtJS, but need people who are able to write code. So the initiative is very welcome.

After the mitap, 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 .

News from GitHub

• 14534 - long-awaited pull request with refactoring from Jason. There is still a lot of work, you need 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 entirely, but Ivan Bochkarev decided, for now, 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!
• # 14540 is another improvement to the same widget, but the issue with dates and editing times has now been resolved.
• # 14532 - it turned out that there is a bug when deleting admin menu items, when only the item itself is deleted, and all nested in it remain and when you need to add a new item, you can catch the unpleasant error that the menu item already exists, but you can't see it. Now the menu items will be deleted with all nested items, so be careful when deleting any item at the top.
• # 14527 - A discussion is underway on how best to implement adding 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 intrusiveness 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 panel. Saving a couple of kilometers of nerve fibers.

Interesting notes and articles

• Getting rid of the “modAction support is deprecated” error in the old packages - Ilya Utkin tells how to fix your add-ons (if you did such) in order to avoid using outdated functions, which now just swear into the log, but in the new version of MODX they will be deleted and your code will stop working.
• Import and export of MySQL backups - overview of the add-on sOneDumper , which allows you to make copies of the project database (backup) and is able to restore the site from the saved copies.
• Check for filling in the alt attribute of the img tag is an interesting note from Paul (iWatchYouFromAfar) about solving the problem of filling in the required attributes of images in the text of the article, especially when pictures are added through a regular editor.
• Who is interested in the fate of the MODX documentation (including in Russian and not only), you can follow or participate in the discussion of the project in a new forum .
• March update of MODX 3 project status from Gauke Pieter Sietzema.
• If you suddenly missed, then here is the link to the recording of the broadcast mitap from Amsterdam .
• Detailed instructions on how to customize multilanguage in MODX using contexts and add Babel.
• From the found video tutorials - a new series about MODX from Kamil Abzalov.

New and updated add-ons

• ThemeBulma-1.0.0-beta is 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 is Egor Levin's first addition to 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 more.

  
  

• jwtSession-1.0.1-pl is a 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 business sites - need to be tested. In the past digest, a post was mentioned describing how it all works.

  
  

• UserTest-4.1.0-beta - a component for testing users - continues to improve. In the new version added:
  - Made a separate table 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 display answers in random order.
  - Validation of answers to the 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.
  - Crown notification of not passed the 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 quotes links in social networks.

  
  

• Commerce-1.0.0-rc3 is a major update to the e-commerce solution from Mark Hamstra, which he presented at the meeting in Amsterdam.

  
  

• Following were updated some Commerce plugins - Formula Shipping for Commerce , Mailchimp API for Commerce , Print Order for Commerce and GuestOrderView for Commerce .

  
  

Thanks for attention!

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PS From the digest, links to paid components are cut in order not to violate the rules of the sites where the digest is published. Where to find them, you yourself know very well.