It’s been too long since our last MODX Cloud update. Along with general MODX Cloud Dashboard performance and user experience improvements, we’ve rolled out some really great updates and new features.
Gen 2 Platforms 🚀
The new Gen 2 platforms underpinning MODX Cloud have taken our already-impressive speed, security, and managed maintenance to an even higher level. What this means is that your sites should serve more quickly, and your visitors and search spiders will love you for it.
Gen 2 platforms also bring PHP 8 and 8.1 (8.2 soon), tied to the latest database and web server stack, and hardware with much higher overall IO, memory, and CPU performance.
Rock Your Content with Backstage™
Whether you’re a freelancer working for a small business website, the defacto in-house web person, or part of a development team at a digital agency, Backstage helps you collaborate on content in a way that’s never been available before. It’s incredibly productive, a lot more safe, and even can make working on content way more fun by removing tons of friction and frustration.
Backstage empowers non-technical people to run websites the right way. It’s like having a DB guru and sysadmin running content staging on your schedule and at your whim, but without having to keep them on call, accomodate their schedules, or listen to surly commentary.
Backstage brings selective content staging to the masses.
This means you can work on many parts of a website simultaneously, but only selectively push what’s ready to go live without having to wait on everything (or everyone) else. Check boxes next to the list of changes, push the deploy button, and in a minute or so your new content is live while you continue working away on the other parts of the site.
Not that mistakes would ever happen, but if they do, they’re made out of the public eye on a staging server where you can have another set of eyes look at or approve things before pushing them live.
This turns previously impossible, impractical, or prohibitively expensive content creation workflows into a breeze:
- Protected Content Preview → Stakeholder Approvals → Push only what’s ready to Production,
- Dev → Stage → Production,
- Website redesign projects pushing to both production websites and a redesign instance so all the content is there six months down the road when the site is ready to re-launch, and
- Some other really cool things we look forward to releasing soon…
You won’t find Backstage™ anywhere else. Learn more about the best way to stage content on our website.
Better Backups
Paired with the new platforms, we’ve rolled out more configurable backup schedules for customers starting on our Pro plan. Previously MODX Cloud allowed you to specify 1-30 days of backup retention. Now, we have you covered if you wish to configure a more sophisticated backup retention scheme. Typically required by Enterprise and Government users, it’s now available to you (and to your customers):
- 1-60 nightly backups … Select as few as a single backup, or as many as 60. We generally recommend 14 to give yourself a cushion, just in case.
- 0-52 weeks every Sunday
- 0-24 months on the last day of the month
- Annual on the last day of the year
Backups now display the web rules with the backup view, which is useful for more complex sites like multi-lingual, many NGINX redirects, or advanced routing.
Save Space with Archive Clouds
Have you wrapped a project but might want to be able to easily reference it later but without having to keep a live copy laying around? Archive Clouds have you covered.
Archive Clouds keep the complete configuration of your project including Add-ons, domains, web rules, etc., and stores a backup of the latest state of the website. Then it cancels the billing for domains and Add-ons but keeps it ready to restore later with a simple click of a button. Any manual backups or Snapshots will remain in your account, but nightly backups will age out over time leaving just the archive backup in place—making Archive Clouds virtually free. Learn more about saving space and deluttering your account with Archive Clouds.
Get Control with DNS in MODX Cloud
We’ve helped many customers who struggle with legacy DNS providers, often at legacy domain registrars with confusing, hard to find, and/or slow systems.
Moving DNS to MODX Cloud has solved three problems: 1) blazing fast updates, 2) advanced record-type support for things like ALIAS records, and 3) the ability to move sites in near real-time to another platform, for example, to help mitigate an attack, add CDN/WAF, or to migrate it to a newer platform without delay.
Automagical Migrations (Really!)
As part of our Gen 2 platform modernization project, we created a robust self-serve website migration tool. It helps even non-technical people move sites to new servers without downtime. The hardest part of a migration is typically updating the DNS update, but if your DNS was in MODX Cloud we could even handle that for you. 😉
After watching customers self-serve through thousands of website migrations—only a few needed assistance—we can safely say it’s a great process that works very well. Migrations work for both public platforms and private servers, and soon they will be enabled for Gen 2-to-Gen 2 servers. Learn more about the right way to migrate a website to a new server.
What Would You Like to See?
There’s a lot more in store for MODX Cloud—we can’t wait to continue building the ultimate platform for your sites—and we’d love to hear what you think. Just let us know.