Questions about MODX and MODX Cloud

General
1

Hi I’m very interested in MODX and MODX Cloud. I have some questions.

I can find very few videos about MODX on YouTube, even on the MODX channel. Is MODX a living project? If I commit to this as a solution for my clients, will MODX be around in a couple of years?

I read through the article ‘Hardening MODX Revolution’ here:
https://docs.modx.com/3.x/en/getting-started/maintenance/securing-modx

Does MODX Cloud take care of all of requirements described in that article? I read this article A secure website starts with secure CMS software but it doesn’t cover everything in the docs article.

Does MODX Cloud have a data center in the UK or EU - I need this for GDPR reasons.

Thanks, Tony

2

Hey Tony,

to answer your first question: I truly belive (and also really hope) that MODX will stay for a long time. Yes, the YouTube side is not as filled with tutorials as it is for other CMS’ but you will find atleast one thread in this forum here for any question you might have and if not, there’s loads of great people here to help you out.

Depending on your own background and coding skills, MODX tends to have a steeper learning curve but once you get the hang of it, you’ll learn to love the flexibility and freedom it gives you for almost any webproject (atleast that is the case for me).

If you want to dive deeper, there’s an older post regarding The Future of MODX.

For any Cloud related questions, I would probably just send a direct message via the contact form at modx.com.

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3

Hi @vibedesign Thanks for responding. I have received some very helpful emails from Ryan which answered all my questions. It’s also great to see a user like yourself being so positive about the future of MODX.
I do have coding skills, plus I use Claude AI every day, and it knows MODX well !
I’ve searched for a few months for a CMS and I thinkMODX ticks all the boxes.
Tony

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4

Btw - I love your website!

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5

Thank you! It’s actually quite outdated to be honest but always too busy to work on my own things :wink:

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6

Your websites are a work of art mate! I’m blown away, especially if these are MODX sites!

7

Those are all MODX sites, yes. But to be fair, MODX has nothing to do with the templating or design by itself, it just really gives a great structure and basis to create sites where you can build upon using your own designs, templates or themes.

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8

Hello Tony,

I have been using MODX Cloud for over 2 years now and absolutely love it.
It is not very cheap compared to basic hosting I had before but the MODX optimized features and easy copy, inject and backup of MODX sites makes it worth it.

Support is also very good and fast. About your questions:

  • MODX on YouTube (and online in general) is sadly very unknow, it is one of the things MODX CMS badly needs to improve. I plan to start making YouTube MODX video’s soon again, has been a very long time.
  • MODX Cloud takes care of all those security steps and more. Some info here: https://support.modx.com/hc/en-us/articles/27653825625627-Overview-of-MODX-Cloud-Infrastructure
  • Data centers from MODX Cloud are available in: USA, The Netherlands, Germany, United Kingdom and Australia…
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Many thanks for your replay @designfromwithin

10

Excellent questions!

Another +1 for MODX Cloud. I use it all the time for testing and development. The support is great, and it’s really nice to be able to quickly spin up a new cloud instance for testing ideas and code.

As for whether it’s an active project, see the GitHub repo for MODX.

I went with MODX years ago for a different reason than many others. I did so because of the fantastic support available on this Forum (and it’s predecessor, where a ton of valuable information is archived). Another important reason was this Forum’s complete lack of the demeaning and insulting responses often seen on the forums of other CMS platforms.

I stayed because of the solid architecture and creative freedom build into MODX. Pretty much anything you can think of to do on a website is possible with MODX.

I ended up contributing to the core code, writing many MODX extras, and writing an 800+ page book on MODX. And I’m working (very slowly) on the Second Edition of the book.

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11

Thanks for the input @bobray I will shortly sign-up for MODX Cloud. I’ve swapped emails with Ryan and I can see that it’s a no-brainer, especially for the security aspect.
It’s interesting how the mood and tone of a forum could sway you - I felt the same way about Stack Overflow. The rise of ChatGPT 3.5 was good dose of karma for those guys.
Looking forward for more info on the second edition of your book.
One thing - I am going to build a site for my services. Do you know of a way to do split testing of headlines? If the headline is in a chunk, can it be selected based on a date or similar?
Tony

12

Absolutely. There may be an extra for that, but if not, a fairly simple PHP snippet like this one could do it:

This tag where you want the chunk content to appear:

[[!ABtest]]

This code in the snippet:

/* ABtest Snippet */
$day = date('d', time());

if ($day % 2) {
    $output = $modx->getChunk("OddChunk");
} else {
    $output =  $modx->getChunk("EvenChunk");
}

return $output;

Welcome to MODX :smiley:

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@bobray Thanks for this! It looks very straightforward.