New Year, New Phone Number Well, it’s not really a NEW phone number. We’ve using our new number, 845-262-0332, for quite a while now. But we are now retiring our old number, 845-228-8821. Please update your contact info for us.  Vacation Time We’ll be on vacation from December 14 through Christmas weekend, and will be working to tie up any loose ends before we leave. We’ll be back in the office on December 26. Website Spotlight We love partnering with other designers to bring their visions to life on the web. This past year, we’ve been brought onboard to create sites and programming for two different electric vehicle–oriented projects. It’s great to see the explosion of interest in transitioning to a cleaner world. One of these clients produces conferences of all kinds, and sent us a custom design for their series of EV-related trainings. Visit the site at evchargingsummit.com. New Year, New Version of MODX MODX 3 has been out for a while now, and has already been updated twice. It’s a major upgrade, including a massive update to the code base to bring it up to contemporary standards (good for programmers!), as well has interface improvements and new features (good for our clients!). We’ve been evaluating what needs to be in place before recommending an upgrade to our clients. Just about all the plugins we use have been updated for compatibility now. There are a few updates that will need to be applied to some of the custom plugins and coding we’ve created. We’ll be starting with the simpler websites first, then move on to the more complex ones later in the year. In the meantime, the current branch of MODX (version 2.8) will continue to be updated with bug fixes and security patches. Google Analytics Update The current Google Analytics system (called “Universal Analytics”) will stop working in July 2023, so everyone will need to upgrade by then. In most cases, the upgrade is very simple. For those who use a lot of advanced Analytics features, it may take a little more work. We’ve been transitioning our clients to this new system, and will continue into the new year. If you use a different service to manage your Google Analytics, make sure they get you transitioned in the next few months. Find out more about GA4 here.   Tools for Managing Your Website Content Over the years, we’ve seen clients switch to a different platform, like Wordpress, because they want a certain type of content management tool that they don’t see in the site we set up for them in MODX. Often this happened because a new person came on board and was familiar with Wordpress and not MODX, was used to working a certain way, and didn’t see that in MODX.  Like editing your website on the front end, without having to switch to a backend editor? Wordpress has tools like Elementor that let you do this. No need for Wordpress here. MODX has FRED (“FRontend EDitor”), which works much the same way; you edit your site while browsing normally through it, and you see the actual page layout as you work on pages.  Want to use a block-editing system instead? Wordpress, for example, has tools like WP Bakery so people can insert blocks of content, instead of editing an entire page in one long window. This is nice for people who want to do more advanced layout without having to deal with HTML. Once again, no need to switch to Wordpress. MODX has a plugin called Content Blocks that does the same thing. It comes with lots of preset types of layout, just like WP Bakery, and it’s easy for us to add any sort of custom block type you need. Google Analytics Update Just about all of our clients use Google Analytics to keep track of how their websites are being accessed, see which content is being accessed, and what needs improvement to keep their SEO (search engine optimization) ranking as high as possible. Google has come out with an update to this system, called Google Analytics 4 (“GA4”). The current system (called “Universal Analytics”) will stop working in July 2023, so everyone will need to upgrade by then. In most cases, the upgrade is very simple. For those who use a lot of advanced Analytics features, it may take a little more work. We’ll be helping everyone transition to this new system over the coming year. Find out more about GA4 here.   MODX 3 Is Out! Great news: MODX 3 has been released! Actually, it has already gotten its first update, so it’s at version 3.0.1. A good deal of the update is in the code base, to make things a lot easier for developers and make it compatible with current coding practices. The site manager has also been totally revamped, with a new look and layout. Don’t worry, much of it works the same way as before, so editors will be able to easily adapt to the new features. We’ll be compiling a list of updates of interest to our clients so you’ll have a sense for what this upgrade would mean for you. There are still plugins that aren’t totally compatible yet, so we’re holding off on recommending upgrading until we’re sure every plugin we typically use for our sites works properly. There are also more core updates in the works that we’d be love to be in place before switching our clients to the new version.  Stay tuned! Award-winning Agency Chooses MODX A new video just came out, featuring an interview with the head of a large, award-winning, digital agency that almost gave up on producing websites because nothing could create sites that were up to their standards — until they discovered MODX. It’s very interesting to hear the process they went through, and the radically different experience their clients had after switching to MODX. Click the image below to watch! Your Website Has No Limits Are you wishing your website could work a different way, or have new features or a new look? With MODX, it’s easier than you may think. I was recently in a group meeting with a client discussing a new project they want to launch. They were exploring whether it was better to launch the project as a separate website or just put it somewhere in their main site. They clients wanted certain features in the new project content that weren’t on their main site, and it became clear that they assumed the main site had a certain “system” that wouldn’t allow other features.  I proposed making the new project a microsite within their existing website, and showed them how I had done this for another client. The microsite had the same header as the rest of the site, but under that was a different layout with its own navigation. It was wonderful to see the expressions on everyone’s face when it became clear that there was no limit at all to what could be implemented on their site. Most popular CMSs do have some sort of “system” to one degree or another, so my clients’ assumptions weren’t entirely unfounded. But MODX isn’t a system; it’s a framework. You can build whatever you want on top of that framework. As one MODX programmer put it, when people want a Wordpress site, they seek out a person who makes “Wordpress sites.” But MODX developers can’t market themselves this way because there is no such thing as a “MODX website” (see this post). You literally can’t tell that MODX is behind a website by looking in the HTML code. This means you can keep the code lean, making for fast page load times (take a look at the chart here and notice that MODX is near the top and Wordpress is at the bottom). Tip of the Day: When In Doubt, Right-Click There are lots of ways to editing things in MODX, and for the most part the site manager is a pretty intuitive system. But sometimes it’s not immediately obvious how to update certain kinds of content. You’re most likely already aware of how right-clicking on an item the Resource Tree works to add pages, publish/unpublish, delete, duplicate, etc. There are a number of other elements that don’t have “edit” buttons or links on text, like this table: MODX Version 3 Is Just Around the Corner A major update to our content management system of choice, MODX, is getting closer to completion. The MODX team is pulling out all the stops and trying to get this finished by the end of January 2022. Version 3 is going to bring a lot of changes: an updated user interface, more modern and efficient coding behind the scenes, 100% mobile compatibility in the site editor, bug fixes, and much more. I’m eager to see what our clients will think of the new system.