Protecting Pages On Your MODX Site — The Easy Way

Last Updated on Saturday, 18 May 2013 10:44 Written by Bob Ray Monday, 20 May 2013 12:00

Suppose you want to make a section of your site private so that only logged-in users can see the Resources. As with most things in MODX, there are several ways to protect Resources.

Contexts

One method is to put all the private Resources in a separate context and protect it by creating a Context Access ACL entry that links the private Context to one or more User Groups. Once you do that, the Resources in the Context will be hidden from everyone who is not a member of the specified group or groups. I try to keep from using Contexts if I can, because they are difficult to set up correctly and they introduce complexities that I’d rather avoid. Links to Resources in other Contexts, for example, can be tricky to implement and users often get sent to the error (page-not-found) page rather than the unauthorized page when trying to access a forbidden resource.

Disappearing Articles in MODX

Last Updated on Friday, 17 May 2013 04:06 Written by Bob Ray Saturday, 18 May 2013 12:00

It’s time to create new post in your MODX Articles Blog. You right-click on your blog container in the tree and select “Write New Article.” The form to create a new blog post comes up, you spend an hour or two writing your blog post, set it as published, and click on the “Save” button. Now, you go to the front end and look at your blog. The new article is not there. You go to back to the Manager and navigate to the Manage Articles panel. It’s not there either, nor is it in the Resources tree at the left. Is all your work lost forever? What happened?

Security and Your MODX Articles Blog

Last Updated on Saturday, 11 May 2013 06:14 Written by Bob Ray Tuesday, 14 May 2013 12:00

There’s serious security problem with the default installation of the Articles blog extra: It exposes your MODX username — the one you use to log in to the Manager — on every page. This opens you up to a brute-force attack that could allow miscreants to gain complete control of your site. This vulnerability may be fixed in future versions of Articles, but for now, it’s a good idea to make some changes to your Articles Templates and Chunks.

Site hackers have bots that are visiting hundreds of thousands of web sites. They try common Administrator usernames like “admin” “root” and “webmaster” and attempt to log in with both selected passwords (e.g., dates between 1900 and the current year, common names for humans and pets, dictionary words, etc.) and random passwords generated in code. For a fairly reasonable price, you can now buy a computer designed just for this task and capable of trying millions of passwords per second.

Editing Files from the MODX Manager’s Top Menu

Last Updated on Thursday, 9 May 2013 02:07 Written by Bob Ray Saturday, 11 May 2013 12:00

Suppose you have some files on your MODX site that you edit often. I’m always hacking away at the main .CSS file, .htaccess, and sometimes a few JavaScript files. It’s a pain to keep going to the Files tab, waiting for the File tree to render, finding your file, and clicking on it. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to get there directly from the Manager’s Top Menu? It’s actually very easy to set this up, and you don’t have to write any code.

Creating the “My Files” Top Menu Item

List MODX Users Selected by an Extended Field

Last Updated on Monday, 6 May 2013 06:14 Written by Bob Ray Thursday, 9 May 2013 12:00

If you want to show a list of users with, or without, their personal information, one of the easiest ways to do it is to use Shaun McCormick’s Peoples extra. Peoples will show information about users selected by Use Group and will let you sort the users by any field. One of the things Peoples will *not* do, though, is let you select users based on an extended field.

A MODX user recently requested this on the MODX Forums, so I’m devoting this blog post to creating a snippet to do it and demonstrating a little about how MODX snippets work along the way. The following snippet will select users based on an extended field and will show any information about them contained in their User Profile (including any extended fields). Note that the snippet selects users *only* by extended field. To select users in a different way, you’d have to use a different snippet.