This time I want to share some tips that I read in the book “Atomic Habits” written by James Clear. It is not about productivity itself, but it is still very useful.

Have you reached the limit of free reads?
Check the article on my own website; there are no limitations.

Change the place to refresh your mind

Our habits often rely on the places where we used to do something. When we visit these locations, we activate certain habits. We don’t even think about it. It just happens, like a pattern. It means that if we used to start working days with a cup of coffee and reading the news, changing this behavior just because we have a desire is almost impossible. We need to break the usual behavioral loop.

My example. I’ve tried to read a paper book before work many times. I used to use the same pattern. Every day I usually make a cup of coffee, sit down in my chair, and… start checking emails, Twitter, updating my code environment, and other stuff. When did I remember about the book that was right in front of me? Correct, after around 1 hour. I wasted that hour, to be honest. I did not work or read.

To solve it, I changed the place. I started reading near the sofa, sitting on the floor. It works well for me during the weekends as well, when I’m looking after my 8-month-old daughter. When she plays, I can read. At other times, I also go to the living room and read there. In the cabinet, I can only work with my laptop. Changing places clears our patterns, and it may help you concentrate on the task you would like to accomplish.

If you would like to do something that you could not start for a long time, try to change the place. It should be different from your usual working area. Try to change the room or just site in the room. It is necessary to break your usual patterns.

More stuff from me

Subscribe to Ivan’s Weekly Focus and get weekly updates about my indie-making journey and tips, tools, and approaches that may help you be more productive.

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and Product Hunt as well.

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The cumulative effect of social media activity

I’d like to discuss the promotion of our work’s outcomes. I found it interesting that many people, including myself, frequently expect immediate results after doing something. It could be on social media, a blog, or any other type of publication that has been abandoned.

It doesn’t work because you want to get dopamine as soon as you publish something by social proofing it. Likes, comments, and some kind of social approval. Social media networks purposefully exploit this peculiarity.

It does not work as well with more serious content as it does with viral content or memes. We need to keep our patience. To fight your imposter syndrome, I recommend imagining that your publication is a seed. And you, as a farmer, simply plant it in the ground and then wait for it to sprout.

Promotion is a strategy. You leave content out there like footprints, and hunters will follow the trails. People may not notice it right away, but they will eventually find their way to your content or goods.

The responses to my tweets from two or three days ago astounded me. To be honest, I had no reservations and thoroughly enjoyed it. Because it increases endorphin levels for several days, it encourages people to continue exercising rather than just posting on social media. Take your time. Continue doing what you’re doing, and harvest when the time comes.

What are your thoughts on this delayed effect? I’d like to talk about it with you. Please respond.

More stuff from me

➤ Subscribe to Ivan’s Weekly Focus and get weekly updates about my indie-making journey and tips, tools, and approaches that may help you be more productive.

➤ Follow me on Twitter to get daily updates about my progress.

Follow me on LinkedIn, Indie Hackers, and Product Hunt as well.

At the start of November, I started work on my English-speaking Twitter account. The goal was simple, to grow it. And during that activity, I found some interesting people. One such person was Thomas Sanlis, who created the website What is an Indie Maker? I translated it into Belarusian, as an open-source contribution, which I like to do every time. During that, I discovered, that there is a big community of interesting people — indie makers. They create their projects, make from them products, and sell them. That’s awesome! I thought.

It was impressive to see how many interesting projects people are building. I decided to jump in this boat as well. What got me hooked? People build their projects and make them profitable. And they use all their knowledge and experience that they have. It sounded too very close to my plans for the past 2022 year — to share more of my knowledge and experience. At least, after almost 18 years in software development, I have what to say.

Indie makers do a lot of activities. Not only applications or SaaS solutions. They create content, record videos, lessons, and podcasts, and create courses. Also, they write blogs and newsletters. I decided to start with something similar, but very basic — writing. Furthermore, I lack skill in writing in a foreign language, and it is a good reason to gain the skill.

I started the newsletter in the middle of November. Right after my meeting with the indie hackers community. Since that time I have learned a lot of things and examples. About how people build their projects and do marketing. How they collect customers and create their own audience to spread and sell products. It looks like startups, and it is true. With one exception. People do it from scratch alone.

To be, or even better to say to become an indie maker is interesting to me. Why? Because I already spend my free time building projects and sometimes products. It may be something for fun, other times it is open-source contributions (not only by code). I like the idea in general! One piece, which was missed, is a positive income. And indie making approach is a good way to turn products into a way of generating positive income. It should bring me closer to my main goal. I plan to reach financial independence before my 40th.

It was a natural decision, but I have 9-to-5 work, and I have a family with two kids. Seems, I can not be as fast as other makers, who left their jobs to focus on their projects only. It means that I have to learn how to use the time which I have. The skill that nobody can buy. Let’s see, how it will be going. The journey has begun.

More stuff from me

➤ Subscribe to Ivan’s Weekly Focus and get weekly updates about my indie-making journey, and tips, tools, and approaches, which help to be more productive.

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Would like to start writing as well? Join the Substack community of writers. They help to grow and earn on your newsletter.

Hey! You can support MODX Digest project and all work that I am doing for MODX using my Patreon page. Thank you in advance.

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

• GoogleSheets-1.3.0-pl — Aleksandr Huz updated the component to synchronize the site with Google tables. What features have been added, the author described in a note in the community. Plans to add more!
• msOneClick-1.3.0-pl — Andrei Stepanenko has released a very large update of his component for ordering in one click. The author’s note describes all this magnificence.
• 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 community.
• 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 component 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.
• SocialNetworks-1.0.2-pl — again Aleksandr Huz. This time he published his component for managing links to social networks through the MODX manager. The capabilities of the component are described in the note.
• Portfolio-1.0.1-pl — published theme component for a site with a portfolio. Includes 16 versions to choose from. A short demo in the form of a note.
• siteStatistics-2.3.0-pl — Sergey Shlokov updated his component to collect statistics on visits to the site pages. From changes — 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.

Thanks for attention!

If you noticed a mistake — please write to me.
Write questions and suggestions on Twitter.
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More news and comments on the MODX Digest Telegram channel.

The version of MODX Digest #5 on the Russian language.

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Hey! You can support MODX Digest project and all work that I am doing for MODX using my Patreon page. Thank you in advance.

Fresh news about MODX. In the release: the MODX Club site closed, progress with the conversion of processors, active work on documentation, notes, and updates to add-ons. Enjoy reading!

News and Events

The shutdown of MODX Club

“There is no more of your MODX-Club”, Nikolai Lanets wrote a few days ago and announced the closure of the site modxclub.ru, while the old articles will still be available on the new site of Nikolai’s project — prisma-cms.com.

MODX Development

Documentation

Ivan Bochkarev wrote a short note on the current status of MODX documentation — “MODX Docs. New site. Translation into Russian”. And I should say, the activity with which the work on the documentation of the last weeks is being conducted is simply amazing. You can see this for yourself — here are the statistics for the month. 129commits, 1501 files, and 57995 lines added and 14470 lines removed! Powerfully!

You can see how the site with the documentation looks, it is regularly updated. And you can join here and here. Or ask Ivan Bochkarev or Mark Hamstra, they will tell you where to start.

Refactoring

Work on refactoring the MODX 3 core continues, but not as fast as we would like. The reason is exactly three people involved: I (Ivan Klimchuk), Joshua Lückers and directly Jason Coward, so before you criticize, first consider how you can help.

Since work is being done on one large pull request, the changes have to be sent to Jason’s fork, because of this, in the main repository, all activity is not visible. However, the result can be seen here — here already closed (converted processors) requests.

News from GitHub

• #14558 — Sergey Shlokov discovered that in the MODX database schema there is one interesting index that is essentially useless, and in some cases even harmful, and suggested removing it. Removing something is always perceived with caution, so the discussion on the appropriateness of this action continues on GitHub. However, the evidence is very obvious and the garbage should definitely be removed from the system.
• #14559 — Ilya Utkin discovered a regression of changes, which is expressed in the missing animation of checkboxes on the resource page and corrected this misunderstanding.

Interesting notes and articles

• Mat Dave Jones in a blog on modx.com wrote a good article about choosing a CMS for the site (from open source solutions), which you can use to communicate with potential customers.
• Personal pages of MODX Revo users — Kirill Korovin wrote a note on his website on how to organize personal pages for users registered on the website. You should decide what to put on these pages yourself, but the general approach to implementation is described well.
• Several paid applications have become free — Andrey Stepanenko decided to make several of his add-ons free. On the one hand, this may please someone, since there is no need to pay money, but at the same time, these extras are now delivered as they are, without guaranteed technical support and development.
• Under an article with the news about the closure of the MODX club, Roman Voropayev shared an interesting opinion on the current status of MODX. Also, no less interesting answer from Sergey Shlokov. If you have something to say on this topic, you can join the discussion. It would be interesting to see the detailed opinions of people on this subject.
• Translitor as an alternative to transliterating aliases — Nikolay Savin proposed his improved class for more “correct” transliteration of aliases, the implementation of which was peeped in a similar solution from the world of Laravel. Similar behavior can be achieved with standard tools by changing the system settings, but maybe the possibility to install the package in one click will be simpler to someone.
• The use of predefined templates for TinyMCE is a note about the capabilities of the TinyMCE editor, which is often used in MODX. Exactly, how it is possible for the editor to prepare in advance the blank blocks, which at the time of editing can be selected and inserted into the document. Almost like ContentBlock, only simpler and free.

New and updated addons

• modRetailCRM-2.5.0 — updated the package for integrating MODX with RetailCRM service, which now supports full-fledged work with modifications from msOptionsPrice2, and also it can export goods with all properties in XML-format. Nikolai Savin, the author, wrote a short note about the update.
• AdminTools-1.15.0 — Sergey Shlokov updated his component with a set of convenient tools for MODX Manager; added an indicator of unread messages and several bugs were fixed.
• Twilio-0.0.2-beta1 — is a package for integration into MODX of Twilio service for sending SMS from YJ Tso (sepiariver). The author has posted documentation of usage on his site.
• instaFilters-1.0.0-pl — is a terribly simple component that adds a filter to the image shown in the parameter, as in Instagram, but on pure CSS. It is free, motivation and examples of use in the author’s note.
• mChimpX-2.1.0-pl1 — Anton Tarasov updated his component, which itself is a hook for FormIt, which allows you to add a user to the MailChimp mailing list at the time of sending the form. Mainly updated translations added translations of some error messages and just fixes of bugs.
• msTimeStamp-1.0.1-beta — Andrei Stepanenko published his free extra, which allows you to remove statuses of goods (new, special or popular) after passing sometime. It works without the need to install tasks in the crontab service. Read more in the author’s note.
• altHelper-1.0.1-beta — Pavel, after his note about solving the problem of automatically filling out alt-attributes in pictures, put his decision in a free package. Please, use.
• amoCRM-1.2.1-beta — Mikhail Voevodsky has released a large update package for the integration with amoCRM. I wanted to list all updates, but they are specific and in fact, there are a lot of them. BTW, all fixes are diligently listed in the package’ changelog.
• msPre-2.2.20-pl — a large component update for bulk editing of resources (or even products). Of the new features — favorites resources and filter on them for faster catalog management and also the rapid creation of groups of products through the miniShop product links. More details in the author’s note.

Thanks for attention!

If you noticed a mistake — please write to me.
Write questions and suggestions on Twitter.
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More news and comments on the MODX Digest Telegram channel.

The version of MODX Digest #4 on the Russian language.

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

Enjoy reading!

The author of this digest was ill last week, so the release of the digest had to be postponed. Because of this, I would appreciate any help in preparing the next releases on time.

News and Events

Meetup in Amsterdam
The Meetup in Amsterdam took place. Some people told me that there were a lot of presenting of own tools and extras instead of MODX itself but also there was a lot of conversation between speeches and after the official part that was not visible through live stream. As a result, there were made some defining decisions about future MODX.

The performances themselves can be viewed in the recordings of the broadcast (link below), and you can 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 meetup in Amsterdam, the MODX LLC team rolled out an updated website — modx.com. This time, the changes affected not only the marketing pages but also the forum and the section with additions. It has some minor bugs, but it looks nicer, especially the section with extras.

Instead of the old forum, a new one — community.modx.com has also launched. It’s based on a modern forum engine that simply works. We have long had one in the form of a section with questions on modx.pro, and now the English version is better as well. The old forum has been archived and cannot be posted to.

Nightly 3.x builds
I started the nightly build service in a hurry before the meetup and made a simple mistake of not specifying the full path to the Composer in the build. This led to the fact that in the manual mode, everything was going well, but Cron did not know where to find Composer and collected the release without dependencies, which many complained about.

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 meetup increased slightly. So far not so much in terms of code as in terms of interest in the process and questions, on 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.

After the meetup, 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.

GitHub News

• #14534 — long-awaited pull request with refactoring from Jason. There is still a lot of work, you can help 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 as a whole, but Ivan Bochkarev decided, as long as it was, 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!
• #14510 — another improvement of the same widget, but now the problem with dates and time of editing is solved.
• #14532 — it turned out that there is a bug when deleting admin menu items, when only the item itself is deleted, and all the nested ones remain and when you need to add a new item, you can catch the unpleasant error that the menu item is already there, but it is not visible. Now the menu items will be deleted with all nested items, so be careful when deleting any item at the top.
• #14527 — there is a discussion on how best to implement the addition of 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 obsession 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 area. Saving a couple of kilometers of nerve fibers.

Interesting notes and articles

• [ru] How get rid of the “modAction support is deprecated” error in old packages — Ilya Utkin tells how to fix your add-ons (if you did these) in order to avoid using outdated functions, which for now just swear into the log, but in the new version of MODX they will be deleted and your code will stop working.
• [ru] Import and export MySQL backups — Review supplement 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 — 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 normal editor.
• [en] Who is interested in the fate of the MODX documentation (including in Russian and other languages), you can follow or participate in the discussion of the project in a new forum.
• [en] March update of MODX 3 project status from Gauke Pieter Sietzema.
• [en] If you missed it, then here is the link to the recording of the live from meetup in Amsterdam.
• [ru] Detailed instructions on how to customize multi language in MODX using contexts and add Babel.
• [ru] From the found video tutorials — a new series about MODX from Kamil Abzalov.

New and updated addons

• ThemeBulma-1.0.0-beta — 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 — the first addition of Egor Levin in 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 so on.
• jwtSession-1.0.1-pl — 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 production sites — need to be tested. In the past digest, a post was mentioned describing how it all works.
• UserTest-4.1.0-beta — component for user testing — continues to improve. In the new version added:
   — Made separate tables 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 output answers in random order.
   — Validation of answers to a 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.
   — Crontab-based notification of not passed 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 quiz links in social networks.
• Commerce-1.0.0-rc3 — a great update of the e-commerce solution from Mark Hamstra, which he presented at the meeting in Amsterdam.
• Following were some Commerce plugins updated — Formula Shipping for Commerce, Mailchimp API for Commerce, Print Order for Commerce & GuestOrderView for Commerce.

Thanks for attention!

If you noticed a mistake — please write to me.
Write questions and suggestions in Telegram.
You can send a link to the digest through this form.
More news and comments on the MODX Digest Telegram channel.

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Do not forget to say thanks to the author!

Fresh news about MODX.

In the release: nightly builds of 3rd version, a new SEO Tab, a big update of Vasily Naumkin’s components, user references on modx.pro and some details about refactoring from Jason.

Enjoy reading!

News and Events

A podcast about MODX — Modcast
The MODX podcast was released a week later due to technical issues, although there are plans to release both a digest and a podcast in one day. Nevertheless, many moments have since been refined, permits obtained from services for podcasts and so on.

Small updates:

• The podcast site has been updated, now everything is beautiful and working — https://modcast.by.
• The podcast is added to iTunes, Overcast, PocketCast, Yandex.Music, subscribe and listen to where you prefer.

MODX 3 nightly builds
About two weeks ago, the guys from Sterc asked me to build a working build of version 3, since almost a year has passed since the last release of the alpha version, and quite a bit of work has been done during this time. I tried to create build but it didn’t work out the first time, I started to figure it out, and then I decided to do not it all by hands if it can be automated and I made a nightly build service where builds happen at every night — https://nightly.modx.by.

There are plans to add language downloads directly from Crowdin, since translations are usually added before the release, and in the git-version, the actual texts are only in English. And it is likely to check if there were changes in the repository and not to build without the need (also need to save space on the server).

MODX Development

Since code freeze was announced and Jason said that he still does something, the activity in the repository for these two weeks has dropped. This is also due to the fact that many people are preparing in a meetup in Amsterdam, because you need to decide work and household chores, and for someone else to prepare slides and talk. However, what did they do?

• MODX 3 now requires the minimum installed version of PHP — 7.0. Yes, many people may wonder why not something fresher, because 7.0 is no longer supported. The answer is simple, there are statistics (albeit not comprehensive), which says that about 40% of users still use version 7.0, therefore, it is unwise to deprive such a number of users of the possibility of updating without a good reason.
• During of work on the nightly builds service of MODX 3 I had to fix a little build script so now it does what it should. In particular, the old script could not establish dependencies through Composer, now it can.
• Mikhail Voevodsky made a good attempt to make everyone well by adding the system code, file, inline bindings directly to the core, so you can write code more efficiently, as is now possible in components compatible with pdoTools. However, there are questions in terms of security and the likelihood that this pull request will be accepted still unclear.

I did not include smaller fixes, they can always be found on GitHub. In addition to the code, work continues on a new documentation site.

Jason’s refactoring
Last week I managed to talk a bit with Jason and I was pleased with the good news. There is progress in the work, the main part has already been completed, before the weekend last week, he began converting processors. After he will finish with them, he promised to show the draft on GitHub.

Now all classes are loaded via PSR-4, which means that no more require_once and loadClass, now it is enough to connect one autoload.php and use any system classes.

Models can now be generated and probably work on xPDO 3.0, there will also be no more string references to classes: we used to write ‘modResource’, now it’s worth writing modResource::class. This will improve not only the readability of the code but will also enable the IDE to more correctly analyze the code and give hints.

This is all so far in words since there is no code yet, but let’s hope that at least there will be a result right after the meetup.

Interesting notes and articles

• The mention of users — Vasily Naumkin on the community site added the ability to mention users through the “@”. And it works both in notes and in comments. It may be convenient if you need to attract a person to some thread in which he does not participate and therefore does not follow it.
• Cleaning community users — while mentions were made, it turned out that in the database with users there was a mess that prevented normal use of the function, so some of the users were dropped, inactive were removed, and the rest logins were “combed” so as not to fail.
• [jwtSession] Session transfer to browser cookies — An example of using JWT tokens in conjunction with MODX. As an experiment and a solution to a separate task, the tool is very interesting, but it is unlikely that it will find widespread practical application. However, it is worth reading.
• Defending the MODX Revolution — albeit not fresh, but a still relevant note on how to take care of security and protection from hacking the site on MODX.
• Good video tutorials about MODX by Coddes. And they have a pretty site.

New and updated addons

• Theme.Bootstrap 3.0.0-pl — updated the starter package with the layout Bootstrap to version 4 of the CSS framework. The update also affected other add-ons (pdoTools, miniShop2, mSearch2, and Office), which use it as a dependency, so before updating, read more about the changes in the article — https://modx.pro/components/17790.
• SEO Tab 2.2.0-pl is a great update to the SEO component. Something radical was not added but fixed about 10 bugs and five minor improvements.
• Jevix 1.3.1-pl — an update of typographer for MODX. A couple of little things and inner changes.
  Article with details — https://modx.pro/components/17827.
• mSearch2 1.13.1-pl — the main update is the correct accounting of prices after the application of various plugins that change the price of the goods (usually various discounts). Now filters are able to correctly take into account such changes and show the actual numbers in the sliders and other places.
  More in the article — https://modx.pro/news/17738.
• SeoFilter 1.6.4-beta — added support for ajax pagination in mFilter2, now compatible with MODX 3.
• ResVideoGallery 2.0.0-beta — big upgrade to version 2. A bunch of events has been added, now it can work with Fenom and can display photos from the miniShop2 gallery.
• cityFields 1.2.2-pl — new bootstrap chunks, the ability to change the city through a get-request and many other useful fixes and improvements.
• logRotation 1.0.0-beta — allows you to reduce the size of the log with errors by removing old records from the log when the specified file size is exceeded. Discussion and suggestions for improving the component in a post on the community site — https://modx.pro/components/17837.
• Context Export 1.0.0-pl a component from Sterc that allows you to export the whole context in XML format. It can also export access rights and media elements (i.e. pictures and files).
• Point of Interest 1.0.0-pl another component from Sterc, which allows you to display the points specified in MODX on the Google map. This may be resources or some other component records, or any other data. Documentation is still lame.

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Fresh news about MODX.

In the release: icons for content types, refactoring of the 3.x branch from Jason, work on new documentation, thanks to the author on modx.pro and video presentations from all MODX-events hosted in Minsk, Belarus. Enjoy reading!

News and Events

On March 29, a large MODX Meetup will take place in Amsterdam, about 150 participants are expected. There is still time to book a flight and get the opportunity to chat with the most famous members of the community. More details on modx.amsterdam.

MODX Development

Thanks to the well-coordinated work of a small team, which Ivan Bochkarev diligently collected, it was possible to put in order both the repository itself and, in general, to discover and summarize a whole bunch of problems that should be fixed in MODX.

In particular, started a lot of work on permissions in access policies: dividing permissions into groups, correcting descriptions and translations, correcting the logic of individual permissions, and so on.

Thanks to the efforts and help of Evgeny Borisov (aka Agel_Nash), not all but many XSS vulnerabilities in the MODX manager have been fixed.

It was proposed to add to the repository the file SECURITY.md, which describes the procedure for notification of found vulnerabilities in MODX. Partly, the lack of a clearly described procedure led to the sad news of the summer of 2018, with massive hacks.

Ivan Bochkarev suggested changing the base font for the code and for the manager. Look at the screenshots by the links, it became much nicer.

Ivan Klimchuk added the ability to specify icons for content types. Now the pdf-document in the tree will be shown with the desired icon. Previously, it was also possible to do so, but through the creation of an extra template. It’s easier now.

Work has begun (and in fact continued) on the transfer of MODX documentation to GitHub simultaneously with the translation into Russian (and other languages). Everything is stored so far in the repository from Mark Hamstra, the site itself is — https://modxdocs.mhserver.nl and here documentation on Russian. Join now!
In addition, Mark has initiated the reorganization of the structure of the documentation itself. You can take part and suggest your ideas at this Google-document.

Vasily Naumkin closed his big pull request with refactoring, but at the same time, Jason Coward (according to his) is working on its version of refactoring and promises to show the results of the work from day to day, which resulted, in particular, in a certain code freeze of the 3.x branch. Peculiar, because we can continue to merge changes that do not relate to changes in models. The coming weeks promise to be interesting.

Interesting notes and articles

[en] The site of the community has an opportunity to express gratitude to the author of the article in monetary form. How it works, you can find in the article — Thanks to the author.

Over the past 5 years, several meetings and one big MODX conference have been organized in Minsk. The event organizer, Ivan Klimchuk, collected all video talks in one place — on YouTube. Have a look, put likes, subscribe!
[ru] Article on modx.pro — https://modx.pro/news/17639

[ru] How to speed up the site on the new algorithm Google Page Speed
[ru] Fighting parsers and bots — meet antiBot
[ru] Displaying labels on a map with a description in the balloon and filtering objects
[ru] Setting access policies in MODX Revolution
[ru] An interesting list of MODX recipes and solutions. Perhaps someone will be useful.

[ru] Great video course (14 episodes) on creating a site on MODX from WebDesign Master.
[en] High-quality video tutorials from GEL Studios. On English, and so far they are few.

New and updated add-ons

[ru] mvtUsers: user management with limited accounts
[ru] mvtDocs: convenient storage of documents
Ace 1.8.0 — added the ability to autocomplete PHP functions using Ctrl + Space; a search for matching a string inside the function name is supported, not just from the beginning.
SiteDashClient 1.1.0-pl — backup archiving to reduce space and other fixes.
autoRedirector 1.0.0-rc — appearance fixes.

To be continued…

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P.S. I apologize for the delay in release, forced family circumstances.

P.P.S. This digest translated from the Russian version and here news mostly from Russian-speaking community but I will be appreciated if you send me interesting links for the next episode.