At the beginning of February, we joined forces with Pixmill to organize the 5th MODX Snowup! Together with our colleagues from Heibel and participants from Switzerland, the Netherlands, Serbia, Germany, the United Kingdom and Russia, we can look back at a very successful MODX event. Two days filled with talks and bug hunting, to make the MODX CMS better together. Want to discover what we learned? Get ready for the 5th annual MODX Snowup!
Friday: Talk nerdy to me.
We kicked things officially off on Friday, with an afternoon filled with exciting talks about development in general and specifically MODX. We had talks from Pixmill, Sterc, Treehill Studio, and Julian Weaver. Excited to know what we learned? Let’s dive in!
Pixmill: Fabian and Gregor show their workflow
Followed by a discussion about optimizing everybody's workflow. The pros and cons of several CI/CD workflows, besides the git-based Gitify solution, were discussed and shared on the screen.
Development setups were also discussed, and there were a lot of different local development setups. Most of these setups involved Docker. During the day we also demonstrated the Sterc Docker-powered local development setup to fellow developers.
Modmore: Mark talks about ContentBlocks 2
ContentBlocks is the foundation of every single MODX website we create. It makes creating pages a breeze, by giving content managers a set of building blocks that they can use to build up a page.
We are not allowed to share any screenshots of ContentBlocks 2, but we can give some highlights: less clutter in the user interface giving more focus on content, and the ability to copy/paste blocks.
Sterc: Roel on Fenom
Our very own Roel Zeilstra led a hands-on workshop on Fenom, a high-speed MODX parser and templating engine. Roel did a presentation on Fenom in Rome last year, and based on positive feedback, he has now given a workshop on the subject using real-world examples.
Fenom makes it easier for developers to create complex templates and keeps everything file-based, making it possible to have a complete web application in version control.
Julian Weaver about Mithril
Julian Weaver introduced us to Mithril, a minimal/lightweight JavaScript framework aimed at single-page applications. The introduction was done by showcasing his Adidas web application, which allows users to take a selfie, which is then used in a player card with their scores and stats.
Mithril can make it easier and save you time on small single-page applications, which still require some interactivity from the user side.
Treehil Studios: Thomas about Cursus, an add-on for the Agenda MODX Extra
Treehil Studios released the Agenda Extra in 2019, a complete event management module that powers your website calendar. Create recurring events, multiple calendars, categories, and locations, and import events automatically from iCal/XML feeds.
During the Snowup, we got a demo of the upcoming release of Cursus, which adds the ability to manage courses, organizers, participants, repeating events, attendees, and payments.
Vasily Naumkin on Laravel & NUXT
Vasily showed off his framework which uses Laravel and NUXT as a golden combo. Sterc uses Laravel for the backend of custom applications. If that application also has a frontend, it's usually paired with Vue. NUXT is a framework on top of Vue to make development easier. It sets up a lot of things automatically if you commit to the NUXT structure, meaning you need less setup time and have more time to actually develop features.
Saturday: Bug Hunt day!
Saturday we focused on improving the MODX user experience by fixing bugs and adding some new features.
Sterc's contribution this day:
- Tested the new version of SEO Suite, which will be released soon
- Improve Two Factor Authentication Extra to allow automatic submission of one-time codes from password managers
- Improved our skeleton MODX installation to comply with new W3C standards
- Changed security & GDPR behavior in FormIt and fixed some open issues and pull requests for the next release.
We want to give a big shout-out to Fabian Christen and Reto Eller from Pixmill for organizing this Snowup again. And we couldn’t forget our very own Roel Zeilstra. Looking forward to the next event: the 1st MODX Meetup in Belgrade (Serbia). This event is scheduled for April 19th! See you there!
