What are your default Extras

risingisland

The reason I still use PackageManager, and have it install with Evo, is because I can already have several extras, that may have been personalized, or had langs added, etc., already listed and ready to install, without having to upload them later.
Just a personal preference.

fourroses666

Ah oke, I think that is possible too with Extras using your own package thow.

risingisland

Graffx Design I know that via Extras, you can upload your own package. I see you can also create your own repository on the ModX-Store site.
What I do with PackageManager is, include it during install as well as have a folder "assets/packages/" with several extras in this folder. In this way, I do not need to upload or download, or login to the store. My packages are already there and ready. It may be a bit different, but works nicely for me.

mplavala

risingisland Does this also mean that your packages get automatically upgraded if you install them from GitHub?

risingisland

mplavala No. These are usually either custom packages or maybe a package that exists in Extras, but I have had to manually update (missing a lang that is needed, apply a fix or pull that was never added, etc.). Or, I have a MultiTV or other that is just quicker for me to include in this folder at the time up install/upload, that add later.

I am just now trying to update my repositories on GitHub now, as I havent been keeping that area very updated in quite some time. 😅

risingisland

mplavala There is also this Module, MyGitX, that can list Repositories, I may try to incorporate this into PackageManager.

mplavala

risingisland Thanks for the heads-up. I don't know whether there will be need for extending PackageManager. I mean, after all, there will be need to create some ecosystem of evo cms extras and so I am hoping that some reasonable system is going to be included in core evo, so maybe thatwould be a solution.
@Graffx Design do you know whether something like this is being prepared and what the future holds for us? E.g. I have recently done a fresh local install of evo 3.0.2 and it does not even include some minimal template or something, so I was considering making a package that would be some form of frontend theme (like the ones for Wordpress) for easy and fast projects based on evo. But overall I think that working extras repository is these days a must for a cms and having one would greatly increase the appeal of evo.

fourroses666

I doubt there will be further development on PackageManager.
Dmytro is building a starter template based on bootstrap 5 and later on a template with more functionality's based on Laravel. The future is going to be different like installing Extras with Console and not the way we are used to.
As basic Front-end developer I probably need to step up the game.

Maybe @Dmi3yy can tell a bit more about the future plans.

fourroses666

The demo will have a Blog, gallery and contact page. I think when its ready we will add a new topic/post and might think of restyling the template.

nick0

Great topic and info in here.

I am still in 1.4.X - it's on the list to try following Marc's update notes to get to 3.x.

My default go to Extras are currently:

DocLister
DLMenu
FormLister
MultiTV
If (sometimes Modifiers don't work as well as IF in every situation)
phpthumb
ManagerManager
FirstChildRedirect
UltimateParent
DocInfo
DocLink
Ajaxsearch if needed (though happy to try another when a search is next needed)
EvoCheck (module)

I'd love to know how to use cacheclean and the webp image converter mentioned in this thread.

Would also be keen on an automatic backup plugin (that simply backups a snapshot) - not sure if Nicola's program ever got out of beta?

fourroses666

Webp you only need to install from Extras and it will do the magic. For background-images you need to add some code because that doesn't use <img>.

<div style="background-image:"[!webpBackground? &src='/path/to/image' !]"></div>

nick0

Graffx Design Webp you only need to install from Extras and it will do the magic. For background-images you need to add some code because that doesn't use <img>.

<div style="background-image:"[!webpBackground? &src='/path/to/image' !]"></div>

Amazing, thanks Graffx Design - I will have a play with that next week 😀

MrB @nick0 - There is not a lot to CacheClean. Just install the plugin. There are a couple of configuration settings but it should work out of the box. It is designed as a 'backstop' just to keep the cache size under control over the long term.

I am also on 1.4.x. Was going to jump to 2.0 but not sure it is worth it. I cannot easily go to 3.0 yet as too many of my sites have member logins and use webusers, which I believe are not part of 3.0 so it will have to wait until I can put the time in to figure out a migration strategy.

Brilliant, thanks for the info MrB . will give CacheClean a go next week.

Agreed on the updating. To me, I am not sure if it is necessary. Nor do I understand why v2 was around for 3 minutes before jumping to v3. I don't care about Lavarel - I am not a programmer. Evo has worked fine for me without Lavarel and with the handy snippets etc over many years. I am in the "if it ain't broke don't fix it camp" and don't understand the need for speedy development at the expense of backward compatability and migration challenges.

bossloper

@nick0 - There is not a lot to CacheClean. Just install the plugin. There are a couple of configuration settings but it should work out of the box. It is designed as a 'backstop' just to keep the cache size under control over the long term.

I am also on 1.4.x. Was going to jump to 2.0 but not sure it is worth it. I cannot easily go to 3.0 yet as too many of my sites have member logins and use webusers, which I believe are not part of 3.0 so it will have to wait until I can put the time in to figure out a migration strategy.

cimt67

Suggestion for webp!
The "Avif-Format" is the better choice in the future ... and it's Open-Source!
If interested:
[https://jakearchibald.com/2020/avif-has-landed/]

mplavala

cimt67 Thanks for the heads-up, I did not know about AVIF and it is just unbelievable. I tested with one image on my page, original PNG (with transparency) is 226kB, WebP is 34.7kB and AVIF is only 17.9kB. That is less than 8% of the original PNG!!
There is so far no good way to convert images to AVIF in PHP. Most of the solutions use specific libraries, but way outside of a scope of a plugin that should work on shared hosting servers and be basically plug-and-forget. So I will probably not add AVIF support to WebPConverter anytime soon.
But, maybe I can set up remote service on my Raspberry Pi and query that to convert images. This would require running the plugin in the background to not overload my tiny Pi (WebP converter just runs before serving the website, which includes converting the images before serving them; this is also not optimal, but it runs just fine for webpage on shared hosting with almost 100 images on a single page), but in principle once AVIF images are cached, you do not need to create them again. But this would require making a completely new plugin (with better suited name), so this will probably take a lot of time.

fourroses666

Nice! Seems to be an even bigger / better compression indeed but seems to be only working on Chrome at this moment unfortunately. I'm very happy with .webp at the moment and in the future really should check the browser compatibility's again.

<picture>
   <source srcset="example.avif" type="image/avif">
   <source srcset="fallback.webp" type="image/webp">
   <img src="fallback.jpg" alt="AVIF example with WebP and JPEG fallback">
</picture>

cimt67

Too early to use it... of course,
but I think, it will be the new web standard in near future!
The compression is just too good!

mplavala

cimt67 I don't think so. Even WebP is quite good and it is usually only used behind the users back and most people that know about JPEG and PNG don't know about WebP. Even most image viewers do not support WebP and it might be problem for some pages if the users can not download and display the images in their device. I know that it will make a difference that AVIF is open source, but still I remain doubtful.
Also look at standard Wordpress site with theme and several plugins loading megabytes of bloated libraries, several versions of jQuery and so on. Most people just don't care for compression and don't look into performance too much, so unless Wordpress and other CMS do no implement AVIF conversion into the CMS, this will be more of a niche thing for people that care.

cimt67

Let's wait and see! ;-)
WEBP cannot be compared with AVIF, AVIF can do a lot more ... search Google!
It already works on Windows 10 paint or GIMP.
Netfix and Co is testing the AVIF format!
Last but not least, this is also an important step towards sustainability, as AVIF conserves energy-, network- and storage resources.

nick0

Thanks so much for the tips here regarding webpconverter and CacheClean.

Moved to https://forum.evo.im/d/111-webp-converter-plugin-to-convert-images-to-webp/2

mplavala

I am really happy you like the plugin.

nick0 The ability to exclude some images from webp conversion might be nice (where the webp image has a larger file size)? - eg

I will look int this in future update, I will have some time next month.

nick0 Can webpconverter handle srcset images?

So far it handles srcset inside <source> nodes, which are usually included in <picture>. The problem with srcset in <img> is that it contains several image paths and I would have to parse those into separate image paths. This of course can be done, but I will have to change the logic how the plugin handles a HTML node. I will see how well it goes.

In the meantime you can use the snippet included with the plugin. Just feed it the image path and it will do the rest. So in this case you can do something like

[!webpBackground? &src='assets/images/...'] 480w,

I think that you can also replace the image path by phpThumb call in the second case, but please test that carefully.