Get ready for the 5th MODX SnowUp!

Together with Pixmill, we were privileged to organise the fifth MODX SnowUp in early February! With our colleagues from Heibel and participants from Switzerland, the Netherlands, Serbia, Germany, the UK and Russia, we can look back on a successful MODX event. In 2 days of talks and bug hunting, we learned more about MODX and how to use the CMS even better. Want to know what we learned? Get ready for the 5th MODX SnowUp!

Friday: Talk nerdy to me.

On Friday, the MODX meetup officially kicked off. It was an afternoon filled with interesting presentations on development and of course specifically MODX. Pixmill, Sterc, Treehill Studio and Julian Weaver gave presentations and shared their knowledge. Read all about it below!

Pixmill: Fabian and Gregor share their workflow

After a discussion on optimising everyone's workflow, we discussed the pros and cons of CI/CD workflows. The Git-based Gitify solution was also mentioned and shown on screen.

During this talk, we also discussed development setups, with several local development setups coming up. We also showed off our Sterce Docker-powered local development set up.

Modmore: Mark gives a sneak peak of ContentBlocks 2

ContentBlocks are the foundation of every MODX website we build. It makes building pages a breeze by giving content managers a blockbox of content blocks. They can then use these blocks to build a page exactly the way they want.

We are not yet allowed to show screenshots of ContentBlocks 2, but it promises to be a version with more overview and the ability to copy/paste blocks.

Sterc: Roel gives a Phenom workshop

Our own colleague Roel Zeilstra gave a hands-on workshop on Fenom, a lightning-fast MODX parser and templating engine. Last year during the MODX meetup in Rome, Roel already presented Fenom. With many positive reactions, he decided this time to give a hands-on workshop with real practical examples.

Fenom makes it easier for developers to create complex templates based on static files. This way, you no longer need to retrieve data from the database, but can put this information directly into the code.

Julian Weaver on Mithril

Julian Weaver introduced Mithril, a smart JavaScript framework for single-page applications. For this, Julian presented his own Adidas web application, which lets users take a selfie, which is then used in player-cards with their scores and stats.

Mithril can make it easier and save you time when building single-page applications. 

Treehil Studios: Thomas on Course, an add-on for the Agenda MODX Extra

Treehil Studios released in 2019 the Agenda Extra: a complete event management module for the calendar on your website. It lets you create recurring events and multiple calendars, categories and locations, and import events automatically from iCal/XML feeds.

This afternoon we got a demo of Course, which lets you manage courses, organisers, participants, recurring events, attendees and payments.

Vasily Naumkin on Laravel & NUXT

Vasily showed us his framework where Laravel and NUXT are a golden combo. Sterc uses Laravel for the backend of our custom applications. When that application also has frontend, we often add Vue to it. NUXT is a framework alongside Vue that makes development easier. It creates a number of things automatically, allowing you to spend less time on setup and more time building features.

Saturday: Bug Hunt day!

Saturday we got to work on improving the MODX user experience by fixing bugs and adding new features.

• Our Sterce developers worked this day on:
• Testing the new version of SEO Suite, which will be launched soon;
• Improving the Two Factor Authentication Extra that automatically places one-time codes from password managers;
• Improving our base MODX installation to comply with the new W3C standards;
• Customised FormIt's security & AVG behaviour, and picked up a number of issues and pull requests for the next launch;

We would of course like to thank everyone who attended this meetup, but especially organisers Fabian Christen and Reto Eller from Pixmill and our own Roel Zeilstra! We are already looking forward to the next MODX event: the first MODX Meetup from Belgrade (Serbia). This meetup will take place on 19 April. See you then!

Psst... Are you still here?

Then check out our photo dump of this MODX SnowUp here.