Today was to come with a big announcement for MODX until Mr. Murphy got involved. We have to delay that announcement a bit longer but it will be coming next month. It involves a key partner company—no we’re not being acquired!—but it really is going to be huge for the MODX Community, both current and future.
So instead, we reshuffled our communication calendar to highlight a few exciting things happening in the MODX universe right now that deserve just as much attention, and bumped one thing up you can help us pull off with aplomb.
Discover the Best MODX Resources on the Web
A couple weeks ago, a 100% Community-led project, started by Helen Warner (aka crimsonpixel), was launched to curate the best MODX Revolution tutorials from around the web at DiscoverMODX.com. This is an awesome effort and resource that we love seeing. You should check it out, right now, and submit your own resources to the list or bookmark it for your own reference.
2.3 is Coming Fast
2.3 is going to be one of the first public embodiments of our commitment to simplifying everything around MODX. So far, the unintended consequences of this are paying off. Shawn Himmelberger noticed that the Manager is much faster. The coming überbar search is likewise going to be an amazing functional improvement for busy MODX content managers.
We seriously want to nail an incredibly usable and clean default theme for 2.3. To do this, we’re going to need great designs and pattern libraries to reset the standards for users of the Manager. I’d personally love to see several key areas focused on: custom dashboards on login, content creation/editing, the system settings, and a media manager. Cleaning up the installation experience would be a win, too. The media manager is admittedly up in the air for initial release, as we want to do it right, but it is a very big priority overall.
Help Make 2.3 Amazing
This week, MODX community member Peter Knight (EdenWeb) posted his interpretation for the design of the new MODX Revolution 2.3 Manager UI and got some traction on implementation. He was building from some of the other work people have done in the current dev branch of 2.3, which is now available as a preview. Peter’s work was preceded months ago by Phil Steer, who likewise did an awesome re-imagination of the Manager, and the team at Sterc who posted pixels, too.
The cool thing is, all of those Manager skins would be doable with the 2.3 release as a theme, including the full-height sidebar at the left. So what can you do?
We decided to make it interesting, and turn this into the first official MODX Contributor Contest. Details will evolve over the next few days on the fly and in the forums, but we’re excited to move this forward. We’ll lay out the rules and timeline, share details on how to work with Manager themes in 2.3 using the latest Git source code, and talk some people into pitching in on some prizes … MODX will put up something cool and I suspect modmore will, too … no pressure, Mark. ;)
I could easily see this being a collaborative team affair, to get the best of all experiences in UX + design + implementation mojo; we’ll keep that in mind for the prizes, too. So off to the forums we go!
In Closing
MODX is only as successful as the Community makes it and we appreciate your contribution. Let’s all make 2.3 even more so! I look forward to sharing more details about the deferred announcement, soon, but am thankful for the serendipitous interruption prodding us to improve in other ways. Mr. Murphy isn’t such a jerk, after all!