The first official MODX3 alpha is here

You would not believe what we just found under our Christmas tree... a MODX3 alpha release!

If you've given up hope on MODX 3, that's understandable. But, at last, the first official MODX 3.0 alpha is available! While it may not match up to all expectations (yes, it still uses ExtJS), as a contributor and integrator I can say that this is a big milestone and it's definitely worth celebrating that we, as a community, managed to get to this place. It's been quite the journey.

This alpha release is mostly meant for initial testing, especially for developers of extras. Don't upgrade production just yet. No, really, don't. There are breaking changes in MODX3 that some extras may be affected by more than others and by collecting more feedback we hope to get a better picture of that. 

In this article by Jason you can learn more about the purpose of the alpha, who it's for, and what to do when you encounter incompatibilities. 

For the 40+ modmore extras, please note that we will not yet formally support MODX 3.0 right away. If you're testing the alpha and find any issues, of course please do let us know, but for the time being we are prioritising the current 2.x series.

We're just as excited about MODX3 as you are, so we will start doing our own compatibility testing very soon. The results of that testing (and any updates we may release), can be seen in the hero section of each extras' detail page. Right now, they all say the same thing, but depending on our testing you should start seeing some changes over the coming weeks. 

Roughly speaking, the plan for our extras is to initially achieve cross-compatibility between 2.7 and 3.0. This will cause deprecation notices to get triggered by our extras for some time, but also makes upgrading as easy for you as possible.  

Full cross-compatibility may not be feasible for all of our extras. In particular we suspect MoreGallery and SimpleCart will not be as keen to support both versions at once due to the custom resource implementations. In such cases, we'll likely look at creating separate version branches. That might mean we'll release MoreGallery 2.0 for MODX 3.0+ only, while supporting only MODX 2.x in MoreGallery 1.x. If that's the case we'll communicate that in the tooltip for the MODX compatibility badge.

For extras that do work across both major versions, we'll start a 1-year support countdown when 3.0 reaches stable. At the end of that year, support for 2.x will end and we'll cleanup any legacy code specific to 2.x from the extras. This is necessary, as some technical measures taken in 3.0 to reduce backwards compatibility issues are currently planned to be removed around 3.3. 

Right now we're not able of giving you any solid timelines for when certain extras will be ready to use in MODX 3.0, but we will start very soon with our premium extras and the SiteDash client. 

It's a few weeks early... but Happy Holidays!