Posts tagged MODx
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 use in multiple MODx Revolution projects. The panel will be a third party component (3PC), initially integrated into a shopping cart package that we’re also working on.
Early days… but so far so good, it’s crazy how quick you can go with MODext =)
China Life Style Portal `Shi Wai Yuan` Launched using MODx Revolution
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 conscious, Cuisine and Culinary Arts, and Homes and Property. Education is one of the core elements of Shi Wai Yuan.
It’s aimed at the Chinese market primarily, and it has some interesting and unique content - I’ve enjoyed watching the tongue-in-cheek etiquette videos especially:
For a site like this we wouldn’t choose to build it in anything other than MODx Revolution.
Right now we’ve got 2 contexts setup for the site, one for each language. But we’ll be adding a third when we launch an ecommerce section of this site in a month or two.
Having launched a handful of sites making use of contexts, I have to say I think it’s my favorite addition to MODx and I think it extends its’ capabilities exponentially.
In case it’s of interest, here’s a list of the snippets we used to develop this site, accompanied by some of our own custom snippets of course:
The site is built in two languages, English & Chinese. We’ve done quite a few multi-lingual sites recently, but this one has by far been the most smoothly and efficiently executed now that we have learned from our past experiences with translation management.
One of the rules we will be sticking to is quite a simple one: as a developer, you are not allowed to close a file in your IDE if even one measly bit of hard coded text is left in there… chances are, you’ll forget about it and hunting down loose hard coded language strings is not a fun job for anyone.
I’m also really impressed at how fast this whole system is running - without any specific extra work other than using the MODx caching system, the pages are rendering in around ~0.1 seconds - and that’s before we’ve even had time to do any heavy optimization work or tried out any of the advanced caching abilities (e.g. memcache).
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 couple of ‘experimental’ cool features and we’ve given ourselves an excuse to build 3PC’s, custom TV input types and custom TV output types.
Looking forward to launching it after we’ve skinned it =)
^ Wireframes for the blog - to be passed onto our designers.
^ Backend in development…
The first thing that struck me was how many *good* packages are already available for MODx in a short space of time since we started building sites in Revolution (most coming out of Shaun McCormick’s underground lab). You can build a blog very very easily now using a few core snippets and even through drag and drop from the elements tree.
Adding special touches isn’t hard either - I installed Shaun’s Gallery package and was amazed when I turned on the gallerific plugin, dragged the Gallery element into a document and it just worked - even without adding my own css.
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 but it’s amazing to watch…
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 quite a bit of press up in China, and we’ll be excitedly blogging about it as that date approaches.
I’m really starting to appreciate the power of using contexts in Revolution, the screenshot below shows 3 contexts for one of the sites, using this tutorial we’ll be launching the site with subdomains for each context:
store.domain.com, en.domain.com and domain.com - elegant and tidy =)
We are a Website Design & Software Development team based in Hong Kong.
