Multimedia Design + Development

Testing your site for PHP 8 Compatibility

Nov 15, 2022

The end of life for PHP 7.4 is fast approaching, and many of us are working on a strategy to update and test your sites. If you have a lot of sites or a large project you need to get compliant before the switchover, this article will guide you through the initial testing. Install Composer Depending on your host, you may or may not already have composer installed on your environment. If you do not, you can read the get started guid here: getcomposer.org. For those of you lucky enough to be hosted on MODX, it is as easy as SSHing into your site…

Creating Custom Packages with MODX 3 + GPM

Jun 23, 2022

MODX 3 brings a lot of changes with how packages are loaded. We finally have FIG standard compliant name spacing and autoloading, bringing with it a new way to package your extras. While updating the classic application GPM, or Git Package Management, theboxer (a.k.a. John) added a new feature to create a package. At the time of this writing, there is a pending pull request to close a few issues. However, it works very easily to get started with a new package. In this article, I am going to walk through the basic steps to generate a new "boilerplate"…

Customize elFinder in MODX Fred

Nov 03, 2021

Fred is a highly configurable frontend editor for MODX. With over 13K downloads, it's safe to say that it has taken off! One of the problems I recently encountered was configuring it to have some of the same image normalization standards I would normally use plugins like FileSluggy or a custom script for image handling. Since Fred uses elFinder for handling the image, it doesn't tap into the regular MODX system events. However, elFinder has it's own plugins that can be tapped into. Create a custom plugin Fred exposes an event called "FredOnElfinderRoots"…

Extensions I replaced with Bookmarklets

Oct 06, 2021

I am often trying different browsers, and found that on of the biggest issues between switching is moving all of my extensions over. Especially if those extensions do not have a one-to-one alternative on said browser. It was during my time with Safari that I started to realize that quite a few of my "extensions" could be replaced with simple bookmarklets. In an effort to spread the word I will share a few of my really commonly used bookmarklets as well as how I create them. Creating a Bookmarklet This is the easy part. Quite a few services that…

Increase Performance By Optimizing Output Filters In MODX

Aug 30, 2019

Why do I need to optimize Output Filters? Let's face it, we use output filters because they are easy. It's much more convenient to quickly add an :is= and a :then= than to build a whole new chunk or snippet. But where does that lead? A few months down the line you may realize those chains of output filters are piling seconds onto your response times. What is it actually hurting? Output filters increase parsing, especially if they are used haphazardly. Code left exposed between the ticks can still be processed even if it isn't being displayed on…