Agencies: take the challenge!
Today a new release timeline for MODX3 was announced along with the alpha3 release. It's a rather aggressive timeline, focused on getting MODX3 out as soon as reasonably possible, targetting January 31st or February 14th for the official stable release with 5 more releases before then. You can read a lot more about this on MODX.today.
The most important aspect of rising to the challenge of this timeline is testing and fixing issues or incompatible extras.
We're challenging MODX-focused agencies around the world that use MODX to step up and help us achieve this, and are offering a reward to all agencies that participate.
The most notable exceptions at this time are MoreGallery (which will get released closer to 3.0.0-rc1) and SimpleCart (which will not get support for MODX3).
The challenge is pretty simple:
- Give at least one team member four hours of company time per week dedicated to MODX3. Actually put it in the planner, for example by blocking out each Friday afternoon.
- Keep that up for at least 6 weeks - it doesn't have to be 6 consecutive weeks, but to qualify for the rewards you at least six weeks checked off between today and the 3.0.0-pl release to qualify.
- Claim a one-time 30% discount on any license purchase, or 3 free months of your SiteDash subscription within two months after 3.0.0-pl is released
A good way to get started is by cloning an existing client site to an isolated environment, upgrade all extras, and then install the latest 3.0 nightly through SiteDash, MODX Cloud, or the downloads here. It's likely some things will break (that's the point of testing!), so have a developer working on that until it works again. Make sure to report issues that come up, and if you can help with fixing issues reported by others, too.
When the developer can no longer find any issues on the site, get the marketing or content editors involved, and collect their feedback too. Then repeat the cycle with increasingly complex sites.
As you'll have the upgraded site ready to go at this point, you could also push it to production, but we'd suggest waiting until MODX3 reaches the release candidate stage, planned for January 6th.
To claim your discount, we do ask that you can demonstrate you rose to the challenge. Please keep a simple list of the dates your team spent the four hours of company time on MODX3, and include relevant links to issues, pull requests, or a short description of what was done or tested on that day.
Email support within 2 months after the MODX 3.0.0-pl release to claim the discount or SiteDash extension. The only limit on the discount is that it's for a single purchase of premium extra licenses and must be used within a year; there's no restriction on which licenses or how many.
If you're a freelancer or want to take on this challenge in your own time, you're of course also most welcome to take part and earn the reward for yourself. :-)
We also encourage (but not require) that you share you're joining the challenge publicly. Tweet it, comment it below, or share it on your company blog or LinkedIn profile, whatever fits you best. We'll check in on your progress and remind you if it seems you're not going to meet it, but perhaps more importantly your pledge may convince others to also join in and amplify the level of testing we can get for MODX3.
Are you sympathetic to the challenge but genuinely do not have company time to spare? Consider paying someone else to work the 4 hours on your behalf. Compared to the overall payroll of an agency, adding 4 hours per week is a relatively small investment, but the impact on MODX3 will be huge.
There are excellent independent developers in the community who would be delighted to spend more time working on MODX when given the chance (if that's you, leave a comment below so agencies can find you!), so that's a great way to still make a meaningful impact on MODX3 if you do not have the time in-house.
Finally, all donations we receive until 3.0.0-pl is released will also be put towards MODX3. We'd prefer to see other people getting a chance to get involved with MODX, but we'll happily add extra time to the 8-12 hours per week already in our calendar (Mark 4-8 hours, Isaac and Murray 2 hours each) at a rate of €36/hour—a 60% discount from our standard hourly rate. If we get more donations than we can physically spare time ourselves, we'll offer increasing bounties for fixing specific issues and/or X hours per week arrangements to other developers.
More interesting reading from today:
- MODX 3 release timeline and details on MODX.today
- MODX 3.0.0-alpha3 release on MODX.com