Wufoo is a pretty neat tool - the UI is awesome and the service itself is brilliant. We'll be using it for a Fortune 500 company website that we're building at the moment.

In the meantime I've started to use it to help me export multilingual forms to be used externally with FormIt in MODx revolution. Saves a few important minutes here and there.

This week we've been working on getting two new MODx revolution sites close to completion. After learning lots with a couple of recently launched large scale sites our workflow is becoming more and more efficient. Will share more on that later =)

These two sites we're building are both bi-lingual (english + chinese) and both have ecommerce sections. One in particular will be getting quite a bit of press up in China, and we'll be excitedly blogging about it as that date approaches.

I'm really starting to appreciate the power of using contexts in Revolution, the screenshot below shows 3 contexts for one of the sites, using this tutorial we'll be launching the site with subdomains for each context:

store.domain.com, en.domain.com and domain.com - elegant and tidy =)

After a great week in North America I'm preparing to sit through the 14 hour flight back home to Hong Kong. Will have good memories from the trip - beautiful Vancouver, lots of overeating and meeting a bunch of great people at MODxPO.

Got our FoxyCart t-shirt - but only after striking a bargain with Brett that we'll send him a shot of Eve (our awesome developer in HK) wearing it. (Pics coming soon - in a week when we arrive back in HK). EDIT - We tried hard but she's too self conscious =P

Brett's talk showed how knowledgeable he is in the e-commerce space - we've built many many ecom sites (checkout this one done in revo) but only after listening to Brett did we realise how much more thought he has had to put into understanding the space to launch FoxyCart. Up until now we haven't used FoxyCart but after seeing Brett's demo I think we'll be trying to use it very soon.

If anything ecommerce/MODx related interests you I recommend watching Brett's talk on Patrick Rice's (@AMDBuilder) site.

Ryan was kind enough to invite all the out-of-towners over to his lovely home to meet the family and experience a BBQ, Thrash style.

It was great listening to the stories of how MODx unfolded - how Jason, Ryan, Shaun & Jeff all came to work together - inspirational stuff. I don't think there are many others out there who have gone through an open source build process and come out the other side with something that is so powerful and well thought out.

The BBQ also gave us a chance to mingle with some other MODx-ers who make up this great community. It was great meeting y'all, and we'll keep in touch.

We're heading back to Hong Kong in 2 days - the plan is to upload a bunch of case studies on some of the site's we've recently built in MODx with a few code snippets to add a few more in-context tutorials of building sites in Revo to do our part in convincing people to make the transition over from Evo to Revo in the coming months. We'll also be posting up a few upcoming site launches on our blog - we think we're doing some exciting stuff with MODx that people should see.

Thanks to Ryan Thrash for the recommendation to go to Bob's chop house. I Could barely move after this...

Sorry for the poor photo quality - it's taken on a blackberry.

Cool talk showing how to use managermanager to make the backend easier for your clients to use. We've used it a fair bit - Jeff has some really cool widgets though - one to be uploaded later this week for drag and drop 'carousel/cycle' type features.

The site being shown was Hadleighs Bespoke - very nice looking heavily javascripted site.

Props to Dell for recognizing what a great platform MODx is.

We can see parallels with a site we built a while back - navigation on the restaurants page is somewhat similar to the attribute based navigation Dell is using, in our case TV values are being used for navigation to choose restaurants by cuisine, ratings, locations etc. (see the restaurant selector in the left column of WOMguide.com)

The way we built the backend looks pretty similar to how Dell have done it, without all the manager manager customisations. We'll write up later on about how that live updating restaurant selector is able to give search results previews in real time without crashing the server =) Our solution is actually to use a free Java based fulltext search engine called DBSight.

Also has some other cool features - Try searching for 'chiken' in the the quick search, and you'll be prompted 'did you mean chicken'. All of this comes dynamically from TV field values found in the database.

Just heard from Ryan Thrash about the current state of MODx and the future position. Very exciting stuff, all the core team seems super enthusiastic about executing that vision.

Next up is Jeff Whitfield - schedule has been changed slightly.

Just heading downstairs now to meet everyone for breakfast. Looks like an awesome day ahead of us.

Hope you're all jealous =P

Just finished beers with the team and the rest of the bunch that have come to Dallas for the MODxPO.

Very exciting, but time for bed now so we don't miss breakfast.

Well that wasn't easy... 14 hours later and we're in Dallas.

The hotel is pretty nice, nice rooms. We're gonna go hunting for the bar now =)

Will upload some photos shortly.

After launching 5 sites in as many days leading up to our trip (we loved the deadlines), we celebrated by attending WOM's launch party for their new Mobile optimised site, WOMobile While the site was in beta for the past month, it was finally revealed to the public at another great party after the recent success of their 5 year anniversary party.

We'll be sure to post some event photos when we get back to Hong Kong.

When we find some time, we'll do a write up of how we built this on top of the existing MODx Evolution system that powers the main WOMguide.com site.

EDIT: Here's some photos (taken from WOMguide.com)

So we finally have time to upload a few of our case studies while waiting in Seattle's airport for a connection to Houston... "are we there yet.."

The day before we left Hong Kong for this trip to North America and MODxPO we launched a site for our good friends Mark, Laura and Neville - Gizzy & Nacho.

This is our first e-commerce site built in MODx Revolution - and we really packed in the features for this one:

• Full Inventory management 3PC using MODext, xpdo etc with database export to Excel.

• A point-of-sale system allowing Gizzy & Nacho to sell inventory in their brick-and-mortar store front while producing receipts & invoices. All whilst maintaining a live-updated inventory database that is reflected online.

• Templated invoicing & receipts

• Dual checkout mode - either as a member or as a guest. Members can keep delivery addresses on hand, and have access to promotion codes and store credit (if applicable). 

• Embedded dual currency payment options handled by AsiaPay that supports Visa and Mastercard, as well as China's two major payment gateways.

• Customers can be assigned store credit, as well as promotion codes to apply custom discounts to order totals.
• Custom discount rules are applied only to items that are not already marked as on sale.
• Custom shipping policy/pricing based on customer delivery address.
• Email 3PC using the modMail service to apply custom HTML templates to any and all customer service communications.

Would love to hear your thoughts =)

Next stop, Houston.

Prior to booking our flights to Dallas, we spent the better part of the last 2 months building out a fairly large scale portal using MODx Revolution. As part of our process, we took to learning all that Revolution has to offer - in particular having fun with extJs, xPDO and lexicons.

This global portal features a unique B2C and B2B concept.  The site allows wine-o’s the opportunity to interact with the site by leaving tasting notes and rating wines, it also features a B2B component that allows events to be posted and perhaps most functional, it allows retailers to upload their entire inventory database. 

The site is still technically in beta and will continued to be worked on - the database is still in the early early stages. For all the wine-o's out there, hopefully you'll find some use out of this site and contribute to the ever growing database =)

A couple of links:

• Home: http://the-wine-guide.com/
• A Wine, with global Inventory: http://the-wine-guide.com/wine-detail-page.html?&wine=2593&retailers=worldwide#inventory_list

For the techies (& without giving up anything confidential) - here's a couple of snaps from the backend, pretty much all the wine database content is managed via custom built 3PC's making heavy use out of MODext and xPDO.

List of Components for wine/event/venue/promotion management:

The 'Wine Manager' 3PC. MODext being used for data listing as well as filtering. Really realised the power of MODext and the datagrids in particular here.

Quick editing a wine - just double click on a cell in the datagrid:

Handling inventory - data entry is done via CSV file upload. Wine merchants will be supplying their inventory in pre-templated Excel sheets. Using this component, not only does wine inventory get uploaded, unrecognised wines are inserted into the database. This database is going to get very big very quickly.

Lastly, this whole system is built in 3 languages. The inbuilt lexicon management tool did the trick pretty nicely =)

Come find us if you're at the MODxPO or leave us your thoughts and comments.  

EDIT: Forgot to mention that we heavily heavily used FormIt for the user input modules on this site. That snippet is incredible, thanks to Shaun McCormick for developing something so robust and well thought out.

Woke up @ 4.30AM (:|

Now we have 2 changes to get fom Vancouver to Dallas:

• Vancouver -> Seattle
• Seattle -> Houston
• Houston -> Love Field

We're 5 hours away from making the trip to Dallas via Seattle & Houston. Only a day and a bit to go now til MODxPO... =)

Pancakes and bacon breakfast this morning helped us forget the whiskey, tequila and 'pabst' beers that were enjoyed in Downtown Vancouver last night.

Views like this help too.

2 days til MODxPO - Tomorrow we make our way to Dallas.

As part of my first trip to North America, I'm being shown all the best parts of the way of life out here.

Eddie (Glen's childhood friend) cooked us huge steaks before the Canucks lost last night. Amazing BBQ skills...

3 days to go to MODxPO, we took the long route from Hong Kong to Dallas and stopped by Vancouver for 3 nights. Not the best flight in the world thanks to a couple of sleeping pills that didn't quite have the expected effect I was looking for...

Plans for today:

• Do some MODx work for the clients we left behind in HK
• Do some shopping
• North American BBQ
• Watch Cannucks
• Drink Beer

Flights are booked from Vancouver to Dallas - not exactly the easiest trip it turns out, with 2 transfers within the US before we even get to Dallas.