Announcing Commerce, ContentBlocks 1.3, an improved demo site, and free dev licenses

Marc Jenkins | November 24, 2015

This post is a summary of the announcements we made at the MODXpo Friday night social (20th November, 2015).

Unfortunately our live stream didn't work out as planned, so we've got another hangout scheduled for Wednesday, 25th November at 16:00 GMT to run through the announcements. Come along and feel free to ask any questions!

TL;DR

Here's what we announced:

  • Commerce, a modern, feature complete and fully extendable ecommerce solution for MODX
  • ContentBlocks 1.3, which includes some cool new features like stacking columns, a new 'add layout' button, the ability to rename layouts, and more
  • A much improved demo site, which functions more like a real client site
  • And from Q1 2016, all of our extras will be free to use in development environments

Commerce: the best way to sell online with MODX

We’re excited to announce Commerce: a modern, feature complete and fully extendable ecommerce solution for MODX.

Here are the headline features:

  • Fully extendable & modular: Commerce is fully extendable with modules which provide tightly integrated features that can be enabled with a click. For developers, modules make it possible to hook into dozens of events and to extend the back-end through simple and well documented patterns. We’re excited to see what people create - the possibilities are endless!
  • Accessible & usable: Commerce includes a HTML-first admin dashboard that is progressively enhanced with rich interactive features. We're working hard to make the admin usable with a responsive and touch-friendly design that works intuitively.
  • Future friendly: We’ve built Commerce to be future friendly so we can support MODX 3 without having duplicated code.

Join the Commerce Early Access Program

Want to be one of the first to play around with Commerce? Fill in the Early Access Program form on the Commerce page and we'll send you updates and give you early access as soon as it's ready.

We also have some FAQs up on the Commerce page.

ContentBlocks 1.3

We also announced ContentBlocks 1.3, which includes a bunch of new features, improvements, and bug fixes. Here's an overview of what's in store:

Stacking columns

In ContentBlocks 1.2, you could only have a maximum width of 100% otherwise it would mess up your layout. In 1.3, this is no longer an issue allowing you to make more complex layouts.

Add layouts button

A common feature request was the ability to insert layouts anywhere instead of just at the bottom of the page. When working on long pages, you'll often want to add new layouts in the middle or top of the page. The new "Add Layout" button makes this much easier than before.

Rename layouts

You can now rename layouts, which is especially useful if you collapse layouts to get an overview of the page. So, instead of "two column layout", you can rename it to something more user friendly.


And that's not all. There's also context-aware settings, automatic thumbnails for images, more path placeholders, and more. We're finishing the last few pieces ready for a pre-release in the next couple of weeks.

Improved demo site

The demo site has been our way of allowing people to try out our software without having to pay for it first. We've had our demo site running for a while, and, well, it needed an update.

We've rebuilt the demo site to better reflect a typical client site, so you can see good use cases for each of our extras. The new demo site shows how you can build rich content pages with ContentBlocks and also includes a gallery with MoreGallery and shop section with SimpleCart.

The new demo site shows you how you could build a carousel with the repeater field (a common support request). You can poke around to see how layouts and fields are put together and apply those patterns to your own project.

We'll have the new demo site up later this week.

Free development licenses

In the past, we've restricted each license to a single domain. This caused several issues: trying out our packages was limited to the demo site, and workflows spanning multiple environments was more difficult than it should be.

So, after much deliberation about how to solve these issues, we're happy to announce that we will be making all of our premium extras free to use in development environments.

We have some technical changes to implement first, but we're hoping to launch this feature in Q1 2016.

If you have any questions about Commerce or any of our other announcements, send an email to [email protected] or tweet us @modmore.