After years of meeting online, it was finally time to meet all the MODX creators, developers, and enthusiasts in real life again during the MODX meetup in the eternal city: Rome! During this meetup we had loads of fun, drinks and food, and of course: talks! Read all about the MODX meetup we organized together with online marketing agency Relactions and find out everything we learned during the meetup.
During this meetup, three talks took place:
- Gauke Pieter from Sterc about the use of assistive AI in development and ideas on how to implement it further in the MODX CMS
- Roel from Sterc about templating engine Fenom to make rendering web pages a lot faster
- Dimitri from Moving-In about using MODX and xPDO to turn webpages into printable PDFs
When in Rome…
We kicked things off with some traditional Italian aperitivos and introductory talks. The MODX community met each other again, insights were shared, and we saw some new faces. After talking to each other and making introductions, it was high time to get started with another important part of our MODX meetups: the talks!
Assistive AI in the MODX ecosystem.
Gauke Pieter started off and presented us how assistive AI helps our developers with their productivity. The developers install Github’s Copilot within Visual Studio Code to get instant code suggestions, auto-completion, and whole lines of code based on the context.
Besides the current use of assistive AI in development, Gauke also threw in some ideas on how to use AI within MODX, such as using it to create images, generate the perfect meta title and description, and translate texts (hackathon, anyone?). All while also addressing some questions surrounding privacy and copyright concerns.
pdoTools and Fenom in MODX.
Roel came up next and talked about how Sterc uses Fenom to reduce the overhead of parsing and processing, resulting in a significant boost in website performance. Fenom is a templating engine that allows you to use static files to build a web page. This way, you won’t need to use chunks to retrieve data from a database, instead you place this information directly within the code. Now, data is rendered, checked, and processed at one time; to serve it to the client at lightspeed.
MODX and xPDO as the backbone from app to pdf.
Finally, it was time for the last talk of the evening from Dimitri. Dimitri has worked with MODX for ages and told us about how he implemented MODX to improve the structure of the company he works at as a whole and specifically their corporate website. Leveraging MODX’s user management system within their application, utilizing the API to retrieve and update user data, and creating web pages to generate printable quotes for their clients. With MODX the possibilities are endless, and we couldn’t agree more!
After this last talk, Roel and Fabian took the stage and invited us all to the upcoming snow-up in February which will take place in Fabian’s very own Gasthaus Grünenwald in Engelberg (Swiss). The official invitation will follow! Annalisa Ballaira finished everything off by thanking everyone for being there and sharing Relactions’ opinion on the MODX CMS and their very first MODX meetup.
After all the talks finished, we all moved to the beautiful roof terrace to enjoy some delicious wines and great Italian food - all with awesome views over Rome and especially Vatican City’s St. Peter’s Basilica.
We would like to thank Dimitri Hilverda, Gauke Pieter, and Roel for the interesting talks, and of course, Relactions and our very own Bas Mentink for organizing this great MODX meetup. And, finally, Andre van der Meulen for the beautiful pictures!
