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Contao Two Month Review September and October 2020

by Blair Winans – Community

There is nothing like a well maintained system.

It all started with the announcement of a security relevant update of Contao by Leo.

Simultaneously with the release of the new versions that were supposed to close security vulnerabilities, Contao Manager version 1.3.0 was released. This was to provide improvements made in the Composer Resolver Cloud for the security updates.

But things turned out differently.

On one hand there were stability problems with the Composer Resolver Cloud and on the other hand the new Manager version got a bug which caused too many requests to the Cloud Resolver. In combination with the release of the security updates for Contao, the demand was so high that we, or the cloud, had to handle peaks of up to 250 requests per second. So the cloud said goodbye and with it went the ability to get the updates in a timely manner. As if that weren't enough, the cloud also had an auto-scaling problem, which meant that when there was a big rush, no more workers would automatically do their work for the cloud.

Thanks to a new version of Contao Manager by Andy, the number of requests has been reduced significantly since then. Yanick has also ensured that the cloud has been placed behind KeyCDN in the meantime, which reduces the number of requests that actually reach the cloud. Yanick has also already migrated the auto-scaling back to the 7 permanent workers.

In addition, the decision was made to move the Composer Resolver Cloud away from Google Cloud to a regular, high-performance VPS hosting. Leo and Yanick have taken on this task. The migration of the Composer Resolver Cloud took place on Tuesday, October 27, 2020 at 10am CEST. On the specially set up status page you will find all planned maintenance work for the Composer Resolver Cloud. Andy will add it to the Contao Manager in one of the future releases.

A few days ago the new Version 2.0 of Composer was released. Yanick provided also here a massive performance increase with a pull-request. The biggest project of him now doesn't require 3.4 GB RAM and 2.5 minutes of processing time incl. downloads anymore, but only 1.2 GB RAM and 56 seconds.

In the future, after the switch to Composer 2, this will further reduce the load on the Composer Resolver Cloud, and in the best case scenario, the Resolver Cloud can even be completely eliminated in the future.

Contao can consider itself lucky to have the "resolver heroes" from terminal42 gmbh on board.

I would also like to thank the community for their patience and willingness to keep their CMS up-to-date.

If you are as enthusiastic about the tireless efforts of our developers and the Contao Association as I am, you can either become GitHub sponsor or supporting, active and/or passive member of the association.

Past community events, Mumble calls and Contao TV

At the following community events and Mumble calls, we have discussed and exchanged experiences about Contao. Have a look, there is always something to discover and learn!

Upcoming Community Events, Mumble Calls and Contao TV

  • 2020-11-12 Contao TV – Contao Show #6
  • 2020-11-18 Contao-Roundtable Austria
  • 2020-11-19 Contao Mumble-Call
  • 2020-12-10 Contao TV – Contao Show #7
  • 2020-12-17 Contao Mumble-Call

A list of future events can be found on the project website.

Your event is missing on this list? We will gladly mention your date in the next review.

Dates to book

  • The Contao conference in Leipzig was unfortunately cancelled.
  • Contao Agency Day in March 2021

Blog posts, YouTube channels and miscellaneous

  • I accidentally withheld the following information from you in the last review: Marion has presented Webgrrls in the professional women's network Contao online by multiple request and thereby gave a comprehensive view under the hood. She talked about the configuration, the creation of a website and the strengths as well as all the features of Contao that are included in the core.
  • Philipp helped establishing compatibility with Contao 4.10 in all the pdir Contao themes at the end of August.

You have written about Contao and want to share this page with us? Then hand it in to me.

Contao news

Extensions

  • Ingolf aka zonky used the involuntary "free time" caused by the lockdowns to make old extensions fit for Contao 4. Three extensions for the form generator: newsletter registration, regex check and Default values for Select/Checkbox/Radioboxes. In addition, a extension for editors, which displays additional information like ID, alias, layout etc. in the page tree and, if Changelanguage is installed, displays the page name of the main language in the translated page tree.
  • Work on MM 2.2 is progressing well and there are now almost 40 implementations. Furthermore, the extensions MMM-Notelist and MMM-2 isotope were made fit for MM 2.2 or Contao 4.9. The bug in the dependent package (DBAL) has been fixed with version 2.11.3 - the entry at require in the composer.json as reported in the last news can be removed again. More about this in the monthly MM-News.
  • trilobit GmbH presents its collected Contao bundles in a new series on Twitter:
    • Practical: The HeaderFooterCode-Bundle includes additional individual header and footer codes for each page.
    • More choice: With the Pixabay bundle you can download images or photos from the free image database Pixabay using the file manager of Contao.
    • One for all: The Tiles-Bundle automatically creates all touch icons etc. for different devices from a single image.
    • Set content once - use it multiple times: With a name and a corresponding value, constants can be defined with the Constants-Bundle.
    • Useful: With the Socialmedia-Bundle different link collections can be bundled.

Contao documentation

The Contao documentation continues to grow thanks to the help from the community:

The following contributions are new:

If you are still missing something, we would be happy about your contribution to the documentation - of course we would also appreciate minor spelling corrections and rewording.

Paid extensions or products

You have written a paid extension for Contao or a product that is related to Contao and want to include it here? Your contribution is welcome if you meet the following requirements:

Vehicle manager with SYSCARA® Import
Mathias upgraded the mobile.de module: In addition to the mobile.de import, it now also has an import function for vehicle data from SYSCARA® and is thus also interesting for dealers of mobile homes and caravans.

Security advisories

Newly released Contao versions

So have fun updating your installations.

Download deadline for the next review is December 27, 2020.

Best regards

Bjarke

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