Making MODX Better: The Community

By Ryan Thrash  |  Updated: October 21, 2016  |  3 min read
Making MODX Better: The Community

After nearly 7 years, two product lines and tremendous growth worldwide, we are reorganizing the community support forums to make the free MODX Community support even better. Part of this will involve migrating all the existing forum structure to a new, native MODX forum system which we've been working on and in broad volunteer testing over the last month or so. All existing discussions and PMs will be migrated over from the existing forums.

Even before we move to the new platform, you'll start seeing reorganization into broader categories to tidy things up:

  • Dedicated Evo/Revo Topics—this will allow us split topics and Add-ons support into two logical areas so people won't get confused as to which product a request is about. In addition in the case of Evo, anything prior to the 1.0.0 will no longer be supported going forward since there are so many improvements in 1.0.5 and what should follow it. (Yes, that means maintenance continues!)
  • General Discussions—general community support and questions related to MODX as a whole, as well as a place for private conversations between forum Moderators, the Security Team, etc.
  • International—one of the big goals over the next 12 months is to continue fostering MODX internationally. We'll have a dedicated place in our forums for non-English speakers, and we'll be making all the MODX infrastructure available to non-US communities to match the resources and support forums for their local communities.
  • Partners—The MODX Solution Partners program is focused on helping Partners to operate more efficiently and more profitably. This is a private, members-only discussion group for close collaboration with the MODX team and other MODX Solution Partners.

We are also archiving some topics, which is already in progress:

  • modxcms.com Discussions and Suggestions, Wishlist, Documentation Suggestions & Corrections—topics that formally would have gone here will all be handled either our contact form or in the case of concrete suggestions/fixes, in our Redmine issue tracker
  • Commercial Inquiries & Bounties—this will be replaced by the Help Wanted system on the main MODX website. People needing help will no longer need an account in order to post, and it's a benefit for those supporting and helping MODX grow by joining the MODX Solution Partner Program.
  • You and Your Sites—the Made in MODX Site Showcase offers a great way to see over 1000 user-submitted sites. If you want to introduce yourself to the community or want to talk about a MODX site in general, you can use the general discussions topic, too.
  • Flame Bait—our forum guidelines are clear about not being a jerk, but we understand getting frustrations get the best of everyone from time-to-time. If you can't treat people with respect, then we'll take the right course of action. That may include Private Messages, public requests to change the tone of a thread, temporary bans or getting bounced from the forums permanently.

Other improvements beyond the above will also be coming. Search will now be powered by Solr, and works incredibly well and fast. The forum layout will match the MODX site skin better, too, and the new forum platform will allow us to implement some exciting new functionality like getting points for helping people by answering posts and asking great questions. And perhaps most exciting, you'll finally be able to use just your MODX.com login to get into the forums—no more separate forum and MODX user accounts—and you'll be able to merge your existing SMF account with ease into your MODX user account.

Much more is in store for MODX soon, but we want you to start preparing today for the pending forum improvements.