An Unexpected Conversation with a Hacker

Before I proceed, I want to state that I don’t know Verite’s gender, I didn’t ask. So my references to “he” and “him” are purely an assumption on my part.  What I do know as facts is that Verite identifies himself as a hacker and reports that he is a teenager.

Yesterday afternoon (Kiwi time), a user with the twitter handle @V3R1T3 sent me a tweet and asked me to pass on a message to the MODX team because they had “blocked” him. Initially, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to engage in conversation with Verite given that he had publicly admitted to defacing the http://modx.com website and had posted a pastebin with some MODX users account information on the web. However, given these facts, the fact that I run MODX on several sites and have an account at modx.com, and my own innate curiosity, I decided to respond, ask a few questions, and see what I could find out. The resulting conversation was quite interesting and I asked Verite if I could post the chat verbatim on this blog for anyone who might be interested. We chatted for a while on twitter and then moved the conversation to Skype.

To give this conversation some context, I will post a bit of background on the events that led up to it. Continue reading “An Unexpected Conversation with a Hacker”

MODX: The Official Guide – Book Review

If you closely follow the happenings in the world of MODX you know that Bob Ray’s book MODX: The Official Guide.
is now available.  I was fortunate to receive a copy of the unreleased PDF a few weeks ago and have been looking through it. Now that the book is available for pre-order, I thought it would be a good idea to share my thoughts.

First, I want to say that the release of this book is really exciting and a great step forward for the MODX community.  This is not the first MODX book to be published. The first one was written in Japanese and covered MODx Evolution.  This was followed later by two books published by Packt that also covered Evolution.  I have, of course, not read the Japanese book but have looked at the two Packt books, and I can comfortably say that Bob’s book far supercedes either of the Packt books and is far superior product to either of them, and I recommend it without reservations.

Continue reading “MODX: The Official Guide – Book Review”

MODx Video Tutorial: MODx Revolution Template Basics

I’ve just added a new screencast to the MODx Video Tutorials website on understanding MODx Revolution templates, tag syntax, and resource field tags.

To see the full notes and related links and such, and to ask questions and discuss this screencast, check out http://modxvideotutorials.com/modx-revolution-basics-understanding-modx-revolution-templates.

MODx Revolution for Complete Beginners Part 11 – Using getPage to Add Pagination

Welcome to part 11 of the MODx Revolution for Complete Beginners series.  Apologies for the delay in the series, I’ve been pretty buried in work and such.  In this installment we’re going to continue exploring how to create a page that aggregates content from several different pages using the getResources snippet, such as you would find in a magazine style website, or a blog, or a news website, etc.  The aspect we will look at today is how to add pagination to the pages holding our aggregated content, and for this purpose we will be using the getPage snippet.  We will continue working on the resource site for learning MODx Revolution that we’ve been building through this series.  We’re using the 7 in 1 Business Success Site Template from Themeforest, although you can follow along with any template that you choose.  Let’s get started 🙂

Continue reading “MODx Revolution for Complete Beginners Part 11 – Using getPage to Add Pagination”

Upgrade your MODx Revolution Sites to 2.1.0-pl

In the last couple of days the MODX team released the latest version of the MODx Revolution CMS, 2.1.0-pl.  This new version comes with support for more databases, and improved performance among other enhancements.  I highly recommend that you upgrade your existing Revolution sites to this new stable release.  If you’re following the MODx beginner series here on the Coding Pad, go ahead and upgrade your install as I will also be upgrading the learnmodxrevolution.maryspad.com site that we’re building to 2.1.0 before the next tutorial installment, so we’ll all be on the same page for the rest of the series.

I have posted a video tutorial on how to upgrade a Revolution site at http://modxvideotutorials.com/modx-revolution-upgrading-your-site .  The steps that I have outlined in that screencast are: Continue reading “Upgrade your MODx Revolution Sites to 2.1.0-pl”