Since the MODXpo in Munich last year, I’ve been discussing ways to improve the project leadership with many people from the community, starting with Gauke Pieter Sietzema. Over the past six months these discussions intensified and more community members were asked to join and help in formalizing this effort. Inspired by other successful governance models for Open Source projects, particularly Docker, it is the right time to take MODX to the next level.

Today we’re excited to announce the MODX Advisory Board (the “MAB”).

The Board

The MODX Advisory Board is a group of community members, made up of contributors, digital agencies, vendors and site builders. The MAB’s purpose is to advise on long-term strategic management of the Open Source project. This includes defining policy recommendations, proposing contributor processes, suggesting areas for ongoing maintenance, and more. For example, the MAB will help prioritize key areas of focus for and create a public roadmap for future releases.

Gauke Pieter Sietzema was elected Chair of the board, and Christian Seel as the Vice-Chair. Both of these individuals are long-time MODXers who have been intimately involved with MODX for years, and have been key stakeholders in multiple MODXpos.

GP, Christian and the other 9 founding members, joined by 4 MODX staff, will serve a preliminary six-month term through March, 2017 (15 total). The initial MAB work will focus on setting up the board and beginning work on the Public Roadmap. After this time, nominations will be opened for standard yearly terms.

MAB membership requirements outlined in the charter (see links below) ensure the board members bring a variety of experiences and areas of expertise to reflect the broader nature of the MODX Community.

The process and outcomes of all MAB matters, and the acceptance of any resulting recommendations, is intended to be conducted in the open with full transparency. Matters that may involve personal issues may be kept private.

Recommendations and Votes

The formal way for the MAB to advise the project is through Recommendations. These documents are drafted by an editor, reviewed by the entire board and finally voted on. If a majority of the board is in favor of the recommendation, it is accepted and becomes official. All accepted recommendations are posted to the MAB section of the site.

Only board members can propose a recommendation, but people in the wider community are invited to discuss their ideas with individual board members, who can sponsor the idea and bring it to the board.

The MODX GitHub Repository is still the place to report bugs and request features. MAB recommendations are broader and more strategic in scope, and don’t specify specific technical implementations. For example, a recommendation that says MODX should adopt PSR standards could lead to feature/pull requests that go into the technical details of how to accomplish a goal.

Exciting Times Ahead

Today marks the first official day of the MODX Advisory Board. It’s new for all of us, and we’re still figuring out how everything will work practically.

While the MAB already enjoys well-rounded representation across the board, we need an additional member from a midsize-to-large digital agency which primarily serves large brands that fall under the “Enterprise” moniker. We want to ensure their needs are fully represented going forward—as more and more Enterprise users enjoy all the things other savvy MODXers around the world have grown to love over the last decade or so of MODX.

We hope you’ll join us on this path, and here are a few links to help get you start. Please feel free to reach out to MAB members, if you have an idea or wish to participate.

• MODX Advisory Board charter – inspired by Docker’s governance model, the MAB playbook, rules and governance model
• MODX Advisory Board founding members – an amazing group of long time MODX Community members and representatives from MODX itself who want to maximize the visibility and ecosystem around the world’s fastest, most secure, scalable and flexible Open Source CMS
• Recommendations process – how does the recommendations process work
• Voting Protocol – how the MAB votes on recommendations
• MODX Revolution GitHub repository – where accepted recommendations are implemented
• MAB document archive – a Google Drive containing draft proposals, open items of business, meeting minutes archives and more
• #mab in the MODX Community Slack – a place where MAB members can be found for dialog, questions and suggestions

A Personal Thank You

I want to take the time to thank everyone who’s participated in forming the MAB. It’s an honor to have the privilege of having your experience, candor and enthusiasm, and to be a part of the next chapter of MODX.]]> Wed, 28 Sep 2016 11:00:00 +0000 https://modx.com/blog/2016/09/28/introducing-the-mab/ Ryan Thrash https://modx.com/blog/2016/09/20/how-to-use-google-amp-cache-as-a-free-cdn/ What is AMP?

Accelerated Mobile Pages (aka "AMPs") are a special kind of mobile-friendly page that Google loves. In fact, Google will cache (store a copy of) your AMPs and deliver them directly to mobile users via Google's blazing fast, global CDN—for free.

Benefits of AMP

Google’s mission for AMP is to have content load instantly, everywhere. Google proved long ago that a faster web converts at higher rates; AMP allows them to serve pages much faster than virtually any other method today.

Recently, Google launched the Top Stories carousel to feature AMPs from around the Internet. It commands the coveted spot at the top of Google's Search Results Pages, and Google is indexing millions of new AMPs every week. With your content in that carousel, you get maximum visibility and reach.

According to metrics shared by Google and its preeminent AMP publishers, return users from mobile search increased 23% with the adoption of AMP, and while 40% of site visitors will abandon a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load, the fast load times of AMP pages makes that a non-issue.

The best part is, you can create and publish your content exactly the way you do now. Your AMPs can even contain analytics tags and ads, but you get lightning fast page loads at the top of Google search results.

It's SEO nirvana.

Ampify Your MODX Site

If you have a site built with MODX CMS, you can benefit from all the above, by simply installing an Extra and creating a Template for your AMPs.

Head over to the Extras Installer in your MODX site, or the Extras Repo, and download the brand new Ampify package. Optionally, install an Extra that handles Context routing—we recommend ContextGateway.

The Ampify readme on Github provides an example implementation using MODX Contexts, with screenshots and step-by-step instructions.

From day one, MODX provided unprecedented flexibility in presenting your content. From mobile sites, to responsive design, to APIs—MODX delivers your content, your way. With Google and AMPs, it can do it instantly and everywhere too!

Highlights from the changelog:

• Fix problem with S3 bucket names containing dot characters
• Correctly display image preview in file tree for S3 media sources.
• Use sans-serif font for TV textareas
• Ensure Uberbar search results respect ACLs (user permissions/access)
• Add missing viewport meta tag needed to correctly enable responsive MODX Manager and Manager login screen
• E-Mail validation now supports domain extensions (gTLDs) with more than 6 characters
• Two security fixes to prevent reflected XSS and closing SQL injection.

Important Note for TinyMCE Users

We have found an issue with the widely used TinyMCE Extra (the word processor-like toolbar for MODX Resources) where you cannot load Resources after Upgrading. TinyMCE by splittingred is no longer actively maintained and we recommend choosing one of the other TinyMCE Extras for 2.5.1+. There is a one-line patch available if you want to continue using TinyMCE.

Important

Nearly all releases contain vital security patches. If you are using a version lower than 2.3.6 you should consider an upgrade to 2.5.1 mandatory.

Security is an Ongoing Process

We cannot stress how important it is to run the most current version of MODX. We are always improving security. Upgrade regularly to reduce the chance of your site getting hacked. If you need help upgrading your MODX site, let us know.

Release Contributors

Let’s take the time to thank the individual contributors to this release (in alphabetical order by GitHub username): achterbahn, AppChecker, Bruno17, christianseel, enigmatic, ilyautkin, Jako, labr1005, lefthandmedia, MaartenW, Mark, matdave, opengeek, OptimusCrime, pixelchutes, Realetive, Ronald, sergant210, sottwell, theboxer, thewhiterabbit, and vgrish, along with many other contributors who log & triage issues, review PRs, and commit code. The MODX Community is amazing.

Get Started with Revo 2.5

Here’s what you need to get started or upgrade to MODX Revolution 2.5:

• Download Revolution 2.5
• What’s required to run Revolution 2.5.x
• How to install MODX Revolution
• How to upgrade MODX Revolution on your site
• How to upgrade MODX Revolution in MODX Cloud
• Read the MODX Revolution Documentation

Ask Not What MODX Can Do For You

MODX is only as good as it is because of the many individual community members and users that take the time to report issues, request new features, and submit code to the project. Make sure you read the documentation,post feedback and share your experiences in the MODX community forums.

On behalf of the entire MODX Team,
We thank you!

Serving websites via HTTPS is more important today than ever, and we’ve noticed a large uptick in recent months requesting SSL:

• Greater trustworthiness of the website for visitors, giving visitors greater confidence
• Google factors HTTPS/SSL into search rank, getting more of the right people to your site
• SPDY/HTTP2 decreases web page speed load times, keeping visitors more engaged

Previously, the only way customers could add SSL was by submitting a ticket to our customer support system, which required back and forth over hours or days—not always as speedy as people hoped.

Those days are over.

Now, all users on our current plans can request CSRs and install SSL Certificates for free without requiring a support ticket, any time, without delay. 100% self-served.

Installing your SSL certificate is fairly intuitive, but we have written a user guide for those who love step-by-step instructions. Not only can you install a certificate for a website, but you can also move certificates to MODX Cloud from previous hosts, move them between Cloud instances, and install them on multiple Clouds.

If you’re on one of our legacy plans and want to run your site under SSL, we can help you select and move to one of our current plans, so you too can get access to self-serve SSL installs.

Knowledge is Power

We’ve also recently reorganized and expanded the MODX Cloud User Guide (aka Knowledge Base) to help you do more, more easily. Some of the changes include the addition of a new section called Optimizing Performance which contains articles on delivering your website faster to browsers, increasing your page speed score, adding more power to your Cloud instance, and even Private Servers in MODX Cloud.

For those of you launching a new site, we’ve created a MODX Cloud Site Launch Checklist, which includes all the steps to go from development to live site including web rules, domains and more. Whether you’re new to MODX Cloud or you’ve been here a while, it’s nice to have a reference that will make sure you launch without a hitch. It’s also not a bad checklist for launching a site anywhere.

Preparing for the Future

We have a ton of plans for the future and look forward to bringing you more tools and locations in MODX Cloud. Let us know what you’d love to see.

Highlights of Revolution 2.5

MODX Revolution 2.5 continues the tradition of enhancing functionality and performance for MODX Revolution, augmenting security, and fixing a variety of bugs. The excellent new features include the following areas:

Preparing for the Future

MODX CMS has alway been forward thinking. We adopted PDO for database access years before others even considered it, and you could power HTML5/CSS3 mobile responsive sites with our first release in 2005, even though those technologies didn’t exist at the time. We continue this tradition with a few things that are here today, and that will be huge soon:

• PHP 7 compatibility (it’s coming soon to a server near you). PHP 7 performs significantly faster than any previous release before it so your sites should be able to handle more visitors and serve them more quickly, keeping them engaged and returning for more.
• Accessibility improvements worked into the core Manager experience including screen reader and keyboard navigation on the Login screen. The work that is going on for the Accessible Manager theme that takes this much further, works in MODX Revolution 2.5, too.

Improved UX

Our quest to improve end-user and developer experiences will never be over. To that point, the following areas received attention for 2.5:

• New default content for new installs provides helpful resources and information. Instead of the empty blank page in all previous versions of MODX Revolution, you now get a nice intro page with some important links to assist and orient new users..
• Much more mobile-friendly Manager. As a stepping stone towards a new Manager in the future, this allows you to make edits and access the Manager much more easily than was possible before, thanks to the intense efforts of JP Devries.
• Add ability to unpack zip files in the file tree / media manager

Developer Sugar

Sometimes you need to create custom functionality that available MODX Extras do not address. Often this involves creating a Custom Manager Pages and interfaces inside a Component.

Previously, this required a dive into the “exciting” world of ExtJS, with which most people have a loathe-hate relationship. Now, views for applications you build into the MODX Manager are much easier to create using plain old HTML/CSS and MODX Tags. A special thanks goes to Romain Tripault and Susan Ottwell for this example of the new Custom Manager Pages in 2.5.

Faster Performance

Google loves fast sites, as do your visitors. MODX has always been performant when serving cached pages, now it’s even more so:

• Parser optimizations which improve pre-caching performance. This means visitors will be served more quickly, and Google will give your site a little more respect, which it clearly deserves.
• The new anonymous_sessions setting (enabled by default) can significantly speed up the performance for sites that don’t need to have PHP sessions or logged in users. When this setting is disabled, and a page is fully cached, having sessionless anonymous visitors eliminates the need for a database connection for that visitor on each request. If your site serves even moderate traffic, this can significantly reduce the amount of processor required to operate.

Changes in MODX Revolution 2.5

Previously created sites, currently on Revolution 2.3 or above, should work when upgrading to 2.5, but we do suggest testing on an clone of your site, first. Earlier versions may take a bit of extra effort and code updates if they use non-public APIs or directly access the database.

Release Contributors

Let’s take the time to thank the individual contributors to this release (in no particular order):John Peca, Jason Coward, Thomas Jakobi, Ronald Exterkate, Mike Reid, inreti, Zaigham Rana, Jan Tezner, Elizabeth, Romain, argnist, Anton Pastukhoff, Илья Уткин, Gildas NOEL, Ivan Klimchuk, JP DeVries, Kirill, Mark Hamstra, Mat Dave Jones, Nikolay Lanets, Sergey Shlokov, and Vasily Naumkin, along with many other contributors who log & triage issues, review PRs, and commit code. The MODX Community is Amazing.

Get Started with Revolution 2.5

Here’s what you need to get started or upgrade to MODX Revolution 2.5:

• Download Revolution 2.5
• Test it out for free in MODX Cloud
• What’s required to run Revolution 2.5
• How to install MODX Revolution
• How to upgrade MODX Revolution on your site
• Read the MODX Revolution Documentation

It Takes a Global Village

MODX is only as good as it is because of the many individual community members and users, from around the world, who take the time to report issues, request new features, and submit code to the project. Make sure you read the documentation,post feedback and share your experiences in the MODX community forums.

On behalf of the entire MODX Team,

We thank you!

The New Add-ons Tab

The biggest visible change is the new Add-ons tab for each MODX Cloud instance. This gives you access to additional features for each Cloud:

• Request SSL for increased security and visitor trust, and to boost your SEO,
• Order our Managed Cloud service, so you never have to worry about monitoring or maintaining your site at all, and
• Adding server resources (PHP Workers) for higher traffic or more complex sites.

With this change, we’ve also moved enabling custom domains, installing phpMyAdmin and requesting Compass/Sass/Node.js to the Add-ons tab in the Dashboard. Most Add-ons currently submit a ticket for our team to implement, but we’re rolling out automation one-by-one. Look for additional available upgrades in the coming months.

Accessible Manager Preview

The MODX a11y project, likewise overdue an update, now has a preview available in MODX Cloud. Navigating the entire Manager via a keyboard, and being able to use screen readers and other assistive devices with the Manager will open MODX to everyone. You can find a preview in the Public Snapshots tab under the main Snapshots menu item, and it can be injected into existing instances in MODX Cloud.

More for Less with Custom Domains

One of our key goals in MODX Cloud is to streamline what it takes to create, launch and maintain your sites. Now, you can add up to 25 domains to every Cloud instance for one low price: $5/Cloud per month ($10 on Basic plans). Previously the same price would have only given you to 5 URLS, with 25 costing double. If you need even more, open a ticket and we’ll take care of you.

SSL for Everyone

Running a website under SSL is more important than ever for many reasons, including appeasing Google’s search ranking algorithm and serving sites more quickly with lower overhead. As a result, we decided everyone should be able to have a secure site, with no additional costs. SSL is now available at all plan levels, including Basic. Need a certificate installed today? Just open a ticket and we’ll be happy to assist.

We’re close to releasing a more automated way to add SSL to your Clouds. Look for self-serve SSL certificate installation in the near future, and free SSL certificates after Let’s Encrypt comes out of beta.

Other Notable Improvements

In addition to the main items above, we’ve made some other improvements in MODX Cloud:

• The MODX Cloud user guide and knowledge base now lives in our Zendesk Help Center. You can search our KB articles straight from the Dashboard help widget, and open a ticket if you don’t find the answer you need.
• Need to grab a file you accidentally deleted a few days ago? Now it’s a whole lot easier: restore a backup into another Cloud instance straight from your main Backups tab in the MODX Cloud Dashboard.
• Added latest version of MODX Revolution (2.4.4).
• Updated to latest nginx and PHP.
• And finally, we were able to make faster nightly backups. Faster is better, right?

We look forward to continue to bring you the tools you need to create, launch and maintain amazing websites easier, faster and with less hassle than ever before.

What's New in Revolution 2.5

This new release of MODX Revolution includes a number of excellent new features including:

• PHP7 compatibility (it's coming soon to a server near you)
• Much more mobile-friendly Manager as a stepping stone towards a new manager in the future.
• Custom Manager Pages (the views for applications built into MODX) are now much easier to build using HTML and MODX Tags. Thanks to Romain Tripault and Susan Ottwell for this example of the new Custom Manager Pages in 2.5.
• Accessibility improvements worked into the core Manager experience including screen reader and keyboard navigation on the Login screen.
• Significant improvement to the parser which could potentially improve pre-caching performance by 15%;
• New installs get a new look. Instead of the empty blank page in previous versions you now get a nice intro page with some important links so new users can more easily get started.

Contributors on this Release

Let’s take the time to thank the individual contributors to this release (in no particular order):Jan Peca, Jason Coward, Thomas Jakobi, Ronald Exterkate, Mike Reid, inreti, Zaigham Rana, Jan Tezner, Elizabeth, Romain, argnist, Anton Pastukhoff, Илья Уткин, Gildas NOEL, Ivan Klimchuk, JP DeVries, Kirill, Mark Hamstra, Mat Dave Jones, Nikolay Lanets, Sergey Shlokov, and Vasily Naumkin, along with many other contributors who log & triage issues, review PRs, and commit code. The MODX Community is Amazing.

Ready, Set, Test Revo 2.5

In order for a successful release of 2.5 we need people to test these release candidates on their projects, of course, do keep in mind there will be bugs—that's what we're looking to find. Here’s what you need to get started or upgrade to MODX Revolution 2.5-RC2:

• Download Revolution 2.5
• What’s required to run Revolution 2.5.x
• How to install MODX Revolution
• How to upgrade MODX Revolution on your site
• Read the MODX Revolution Documentation

It Takes a Global Village

MODX is only as good as it is because of the many individual community members and users, from around the world, who take the time to report issues, request new features, and submit code to the project. Make sure you read the documentation,post feedback and share your experiences in the MODX community forums.

On behalf of the entire MODX Team,
We thank you!

Highlights from the changelog:

• Make sure only recipient can mark user messages read/unread [#12944">
• Do not attempt to clean cache_db_handler if cache_db not enabled [#12942">
• Fix broken output filters on undefined placeholders introduced in this commit.

Important:

The 2.4 releases contain vital security patches from 2.3.6. If you are using a version lower than 2.3.6 you should consider an upgrade to 2.4.4 mandatory.

Security is an Ongoing Process

We cannot stress how important it is to run the most current version of MODX. We are always improving security. Upgrade regularly to reduce the chance of your site getting hacked. If you need help upgrading your MODX site, let us know.

Get Started with Revo 2.4

Here’s what you need to get started or upgrade to MODX Revolution 2.4:

• Download Revolution 2.4
• What’s required to run Revolution 2.4.x
• How to install MODX Revolution
• How to upgrade MODX Revolution on your site
• How to upgrade MODX Revolution in MODX Cloud
• Read the MODX Revolution Documentation

Ask Not What MODX Can Do For You

MODX is only as good as it is because of the many individual community members and users that take the time to report issues, request new features, and submit code to the project. Make sure you read the documentation,post feedback and share your experiences in the MODX community forums.

On behalf of the entire MODX Team,
We thank you!

Due to the time since the previous release and the significant number of changes for both security and PHP server compatibility, Evolution 1.1 should be considered mandatory update/upgrade for all users of MODX Evo 1.0.15 and below.

uick stats on the multitude of changes that increase the capabilities of Evo for the release of MODX Evolution 1.1:

• Bugfixes: 44
• Refactor: 35
• Additional Improvements & Updates: 35
• Commits: 322
• Files changed: 293
• Participants: 21

Important changes to note:

• Deprecated Mysql replaced with Mysqli, to ensure compatibility with PHP 5.6 +
• Manager no-longer uses a frameset, it now uses iFrames
• New manager setting "AliasListingFolder" - Setting => Friendly URLs (tested with 1000000 documents, no more limits for documents)
• DocLister is now a default snippet - English documentation can be found in the RTFM, courtesy of "kp52" who translated the official Russian documentation
• Read the changelog for complete details on changes in 1.1

We would like to thank the dedicated community-based MODX Evolution team behind these changes:

• Dmytro Lukianenko (Dmi3yy)
• D.Helfensteller (Deesen)
• Agel_Nash (AgelxNash)
• Sergey Davydov (MrSwed)
• Kari Söderholm (Haprog)
• YAMA (yama)
• Thomas Jakobi (Jako)
• and: Zevseg, Segr, TimGS, jasonabird, bossloper, Eoler, fourroses666, rpre, pmfx, kulmjens, MaXL-ru, janniconl, Fess7, esszett

And thanks go out to all those users who took the time to test and who contributed bug reports.

Download Evo 1.1:

You can download the latest version of MODX Evo from the following sources:

• The official MODX website Evo download page
• MODX Evo GitHub repository

Useful Evo Links:

For those users who are interested in using Evo, but are unsure where to begin:

• Basic Installation - How to install
• Developer's Guide - All tech infos (How to, What are etc.)
• Content Editing - For editors, user creation etc.
• Administration - How to manage users, moving site etc.
• Designing - Templates, adding chunks, TV's, snippets etc.

Haven't updated / upgraded Evo in a while, no worries, check out the guide here

Highlights from the changelog:

• Prevent uncacheable elements from being cached in cacheable elements
• Fix loading rich text editors on non-document resource types
• Cache-busting token added to manager js and css links to force refresh after upgrades
• Corrected dashboard's save button action
• Fix modX->getUser to force load settings when parameter is passed
• Various config_check improvements
• …and a variety of other improvements & bug fixes

Important: 2.3.6 contains a security patch and is considered a mandatory update. 2.4.0 contains all patches from 2.3.6, and also closes the security issue. 2.4.3 is a non-critical patch of the 2.4 branch.

Contributors on this Release

Let’s take the time to thank the individual contributors to this release (in no particular order):Mark-H, pixelchutes, Alroniks, hansek, inreti, oori, jpdevries,whitebyte, Jako, tehsquidge, rtripault, ViieeS, yoleg, tyllo, theboxer, along with many other contributors who log & triage issues, review PRs, and commit code. The MODX Community is Amazing.

Security is an Ongoing Process

We cannot stress how important it is to run the most current version of MODX. We are always improving security. Upgrade regularly to reduce the chance of your site getting hacked. If you need help upgrading your MODX site, let us know.

Get Started with Revo 2.4

Here’s what you need to get started or upgrade to MODX Revolution 2.4:

• Download Revolution 2.4
• What’s required to run Revolution 2.4.x
• How to install MODX Revolution
• How to upgrade MODX Revolution
• Read the MODX Revolution Documentation

Ask Not What MODX Can Do For You

MODX is only as good as it is because of the many individual community members and users that take the time to report issues, request new features, and submit code to the project. Make sure you read the documentation,post feedback and share your experiences in the MODX community forums.

On behalf of the entire MODX Team,
We thank you!