MODX Cloud is giving some overdue attention to accountants and bookkeepers. We hope to make our number-crunching friends’ jobs easier with a new billing system and plans that bring detailed consolidated invoices, lower prices, and increased storage. In addition, we’ve re-introduced the Agency plan for customers that need more storage than was previously available as standard.
Subscribers on the old billing platform can elect to migrate to the new plans today, but for those already there, your next invoice will be lower with at least double the storage space. It’s our way of saying “thanks”, and giving you more room to work ahead of the coming new features.
In addition to ongoing UX and documentation improvements, other highlights from the last few weeks include:
- Kept up with the MODX Revolution releases by adding 2.4.1 and 2.4.2 as install targets, allowing site builders to stay at the forefront of MODX development.
- Updated to PHP 5.6.14 to keep up with the latest bug fixes and security updates, keeping developers more productive and site owners safer.
- Made updating your payment method simpler by making a link available in the sidebar on all account-related pages, and adding documentation with instructions on how to update your payment method. Users can pay via both Paypal and credit cards on the new billing platform, giving them more flexibility and convenience.
- General documentation improvements including better organization, creating content for every top-level section, and clarifying the SSL format for user-supplied SSL certificates. Don’t forget you can always test SSL for free on any internal MODX Cloud URL, so you don’t have to worry about overlooking things before launching and installing an SSL cert on a live production site.
- Added instructions on using Sass and Compass Watch in MODX Cloud. If you ever want to try out Sass, just open a support ticket from the MODX Cloud dashboard and we’ll be happy to hook you you up.
- Added documentation to access site logs for troubleshooting in MODX Cloud, so developers can be more productive in MODX Cloud.
- Fixed a longstanding issue with the chroots which prevented Imagemagik from being used for generating thumbnails of CMYK PDF documents. It is now possible but requires custom code since no current Extras including the suggested pThumb and Resizer use Imagemagik for this. As a result, MODX has adopted these two key Extras and will update them to use Imagemagik when available by default.
What’s Next
As mentioned previously, the new billing system allows us offer upgrades for both individual Cloud instances and your plan a whole. In addition, we can use it for one-time billing events, for instance if you wished to hire us to help speed up your site (we’re reallygood at optimizing MODX 😉 ). In addition to users upgrading their storage, the first few instance upgrades include the following:
- Double the PHP workers for the front-end of sites in MODX Cloud for $10/month/site. This allows your projects to handle more intensive processor loads that otherwise might time out or take too long, resulting in timeout errors.
- Dedicated PHP worker pools for the MODX Manager allow you get into the Manager back end even if the front end is currently timing out. This allows you to troubleshoot your site without opening a ticket to get your site rebooted, for $10/month/site.
- SSL Certificates will move to instance upgrades, free for Studio and Agency plans, and only $5/month/site for Professional plans.
Something Even Bigger is On the Horizon
A completely new Snapshot type is coming to allow you to correctly migrate from Staging to Production, more easily and faster than ever before. This is a big deal. It allows normal, non-technical people to do things that previously took sysadmins and custom scripts outside of MODX Cloud—and tedious, time consuming, and delicate multi-step procedures inside of MODX Cloud. We use it internally for MODX Cloud content to cut down our migrations from Stage to Production from roughly half an hour to 5 minutes or less! If you would like a sneak peak and are on a paying plan, let us know by opening a support ticket and we’ll get you in line for early access.
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