August 2010
2 posts
Internationalization in MODx Revolution →
As our company is based in Hong Kong, our clients often require a multi-lingual site. Luckily for us, the MODx team have given us the perfect tools for internationalization, or i18n, in MODx Revolution. In this tutorial I’ll show you how we handle i18n, making use of contexts and lexicons. There is two parts to achieving this. First, we create a context for each language, and set up a...
We've moved our blog!
After talking about it for quite some time, we’ve soft luanched our new blog, The Churn. Tumblr is great and all, but we’re aiming to do some things that we need a bit more power for (MODx Revolution).
Visit: http://churn.butter.com.hk
July 2010
5 posts
A custom TV in Evo
A few months back I created a custom TV renderer for Evo that I thought was super cool, until I saw some of the things extJs will allow you to do in Revo and then forgot about it…
Still, I came back to a project I used it on and where I used the CMS as an editor (rather than developer) and really appreciated this TV so I thought I would show it and see if anyone had any ideas how this might...
2 tags
Postmark app + MODx
We’ve got a few projects on right now where email delivery is really important (ecommerce order confirmation etc). Postmark seems to check all the boxes for features, pricing is fair, and they have a nice API for us to be able to integrate it into our own ‘app’.
I’m about 25% through these basic ‘wireframes’ for the email control panel we’re intending to...
Proof that using extJs for the MODx manager was a...
I think this is an example where we’re *really* starting to see now the power of the new MODx manager together with extJs. I can’t wait to see what else people start to come up with as more start learning MODext.
zaigham:
RT @splittingred: Updated Gallery 1.0 for #modx #revo - now adds custom TV with resizing/rotating/crop/more : http://bit.ly/8ZyHWD
Some vids of this in...
Custom backgrounds on Shi Wai Yuan
One of the cool design elements of Shi Wai Yuan is the dynamically changing mood-setting background of the site. At this point the site has 6 different backgrounds (grapes, wood, leaves, sky, steel & carbon fibre), each supposed to be somewhat relevant to the section of the site being viewed; so you’ll find the background of the site is grapes when you’re viewing the wine and...
2 tags
China Life Style Portal `Shi Wai Yuan` Launched...
Today we’ve soft-launched a new site called ‘Shi Wai Yuan’ or ‘世外源’ in Chinese. Here’s a little intro, taken from the actual website:
Shi Wai Yuan is a luxury lifestyle website that focuses on Wine, Travel and Leisure, Luxury Goods, Health, Sports, Automobiles, Entertainment, Culture and Etiquette, Sustainability and being Green and Environmentally...
June 2010
5 posts
Evo FTW!
Coffee, Kettle chips, and Evelyn Lin (NSFW). Those are just a few of the inside jokes that make the office so incredibly fun (and I’m not just being paid to say that!). All jokes and fun aside, learning MODx has been an incredible experience. I remember back in January, when I first joined the team, I was still unaware of any CMSes. I had learned to code HTML and CSS, and then tried to read...
1 tag
Dynamic Right Column setup in MODx Revolution
We’re building out a large scale bilingual portal using MODx revolution (due to launch in 10 days), and because of the range of different content the site has, we’ve had to create a kind of ‘sub-templating’ strategy for our templates.
The idea is to keep the number of site templates in check - too many templates always leads to a maintenance nightmare - for us as the...
You know it's time to change hosting companies...
Recently, we’ve been planning on consolidating the various hosting plans that we’ve collected onto a single (new) server, but as is often the case in this industry, it’s difficult to find time for these in-house things. This month, we’ve had a lot of trouble with one of our providers, who happen to be hosting the main bulk of our DNS records. After the 3rd instance this...
2 tags
New Blog coming soon
I can’t resist showing some kind of teaser - following in the footsteps of Jason & Shaun, we’re in the middle of building out our shiny new (MODx Revolution powered) blog to showcase some of the more technical & intimate details of what goes on here.
We’re planning to start by blogging about building the blog itself - as well as the basics, it’s going to have a...
2 tags
zaigham:
RT @splittingred: New: SimpleSearch, a simple search Extra for #modx #revolution http://bit.ly/dAnSub
I heard from Jason and Ryan that Shaun is known for pumping out quality code in a 10th of the time a normal human being would be - now I’m starting to see they weren’t lying as this stream of amazing packages keeps coming and coming.
I have no idea how he keeps this up...
May 2010
22 posts
Thoughts on modx revolution →
(via kybernaut)
Wufoo + FormIt + Lexicons = Time saved =)
Wufoo is a pretty neat tool - the UI is awesome and the service itself is brilliant. We’ll be using it for a Fortune 500 company website that we’re building at the moment.
In the meantime I’ve started to use it to help me export multilingual forms to be used externally with FormIt in MODx revolution. Saves a few important minutes here and there.
3 tags
2 new revolution sites coming soon
This week we’ve been working on getting two new MODx revolution sites close to completion. After learning lots with a couple of recently launched large scale sites our workflow is becoming more and more efficient. Will share more on that later =)
These two sites we’re building are both bi-lingual (english + chinese) and both have ecommerce sections. One in particular will be getting...
Heading home to HK
After a great week in North America I’m preparing to sit through the 14 hour flight back home to Hong Kong. Will have good memories from the trip - beautiful Vancouver, lots of overeating and meeting a bunch of great people at MODxPO.
Brett Florio
Got our FoxyCart t-shirt - but only after striking a bargain with Brett that we’ll send him a shot of Eve (our awesome developer in HK) wearing it. (Pics coming soon - in a week when we arrive back in HK).
Brett’s talk showed how knowledgeable he is in the e-commerce space - we’ve built many many ecom sites (checkout this one done in revo) but only after listening to Brett did...
Dinner @ the Thrash's!
Ryan was kind enough to invite all the out-of-towners over to his lovely home to meet the family and experience a BBQ, Thrash style.
Above is a photo of Ryan’s BBQ contraption being setup - not sure how or why this works, but it’s awesome.
It was great listening to the stories of how MODx unfolded - how Jason, Ryan, Shaun & Jeff all came to work together - inspirational stuff....
Texan Steak (North American Steak pt II)
Thanks to Ryan Thrash for the recommendation to go to Bob’s chop house. I Could barely move after this…
Sorry for the poor photo quality - it’s taken on a blackberry.
Jonathan Atkins of Dell on faceted classification
Props to Dell for recognizing what a great platform MODx is.
We can see parallels with a site we built a while back - navigation on the restaurants page is somewhat similar to the attribute based navigation Dell is using, in our case TV values are being used for navigation to choose restaurants by cuisine, ratings, locations etc. (see the restaurant selector in the left column of WOMguide.com)
...
Manager customisations by Jeff Whitfield
Cool talk showing how to use managermanager to make the backend easier for your clients to use. We’ve used it a fair bit - Jeff has some really cool widgets though - one to be uploaded later this week for drag and drop ‘carousel/cycle’ type features.
The site being shown was Hadleighs Bespoke - very nice looking heavily javascripted site.
State of MODx
Just heard from Ryan Thrash about the current state of MODx and the future position. Very exciting stuff, all the core team seems super enthusiastic about executing that vision.
Next up is Jeff Whitfield - schedule has been changed slightly.
Just finished breakfast - almost ready
MODxpo!
Just heading downstairs now to meet everyone for breakfast. Looks like an awesome day ahead of us.
Hope you’re all jealous =P
MODxPO begins in 5.5 hours =)
Just finished beers with the team and the rest of the bunch that have come to Dallas for the MODxPO.
Very exciting, but time for bed now so we don’t miss breakfast.
Dallas at last =)
Well that wasn’t easy… 14 hours later and we’re in Dallas.
The hotel is pretty nice, nice rooms. We’re gonna go hunting for the bar now =)
Will upload some photos shortly.
WOMobile launch party
After launching 5 sites in as many days leading up to our trip (we loved the deadlines), we celebrated by attending WOM’s launch party for their new Mobile optimised site, WOMobile While the site was in beta for the past month, it was finally revealed to the public at another great party after the recent success of their 5 year anniversary party.
We’ll be sure to post some event...
Gizzy & Nacho - another MODx Revolution site...
So we finally have time to upload a few of our case studies while waiting in Seattle’s airport for a connection to Houston… “are we there yet..”
The day before we left Hong Kong for this trip to North America and MODxPO we launched a site for our good friends Mark, Laura and Neville - Gizzy & Nacho.
This is our first e-commerce site built in MODx Revolution - and we...
The Wine Guide - launched
Prior to booking our flights to Dallas, we spent the better part of the last 2 months building out a fairly large scale portal using MODx Revolution. As part of our process, we took to learning all that Revolution has to offer - in particular having fun with extJs, xPDO and lexicons.
This global portal features a unique B2C and B2B concept. The site allows wine-o’s the opportunity to interact...
$modx->airTravel('Vancouver', 'Seattle',...
Woke up @ 4.30AM (:|
Now we have 2 changes to get fom Vancouver to Dallas:
Vancouver -> Seattle
Seattle -> Houston
Houston -> Love Field
And today to Dallas
We’re 5 hours away from making the trip to Dallas via Seattle & Houston. Only a day and a bit to go now til MODxPO… =)
Vancouver, day 3
Pancakes and bacon breakfast this morning helped us forget the whiskey, tequila and ‘pabst’ beers that were enjoyed in Downtown Vancouver last night.
Views like this help too.
2 days til MODxPO - Tomorrow we make our way to Dallas.
Vancouver day 2
As part of my first trip to North America, I’m being shown all the best parts of the way of life out here.
Eddie (Glen’s childhood friend) cooked us huge steaks before the Canucks lost last night. Amazing BBQ skills…
MODxPO part I - Vancouver
3 days to go to MODxPO, we took the long route from Hong Kong to Dallas and stopped by Vancouver for 3 nights. Not the best flight in the world thanks to a couple of sleeping pills that didn’t quite have the expected effect I was looking for…
Plans for today:
Do some MODx work for the clients we left behind in HK
Do some shopping
North American BBQ
Watch Cannucks
Drink Beer
...