Is your site timing out or running slow? Do you notice it running a lot faster in your local development environment? Does it especially slow down as traffic rises? Guess what? It's (probably) sessions! What Are Sessions? Sessions are a common way to track a user's interactions on the server side. They are similar to cookies, but instead…

Update I've released a sample project using Fred + GPM to create a theme. You are welcome to use this as an example for setting up your own project! Getting Started | Set Up | Formatting GPM | Packaging Themes Getting Started with GPM GPM stands for Git Package Management, and is a powerful tool to build installable packages in MODX.…

MODX has a built in setting named error_page, but that is primarily for just handing 404 type errors when a URL string doesn't match a resource. What happens when your visitors experience other types of errors? In this article, I will discuss how to add custom error pages to your MODX site and to your MODX Cloud instance. Create an…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure Imagine waking up one day to the sound of a loud CRACK... CRASH! You are startled and run into your living room to find that a large oak tree has fallen onto your house. You go out and begin investigating only to realize the center of the tree has been hollowed out by carpenter ants. You…

Data processing is money, and waiting for responses can compound your site's request queue in high load situations. Whether you have a custom database or are working with external libraries, caching those responses is one of the easiest ways to speed up and scale your site. Utilizing $modx->cacheManger MODX has a built-in caching mechanism…