Shaun and I are working hard to complete 2.0.0-RC2, making key optimizations and taking care of as many loose ends as possible. Everyone that is interested, please get involved; test, use, and create with RC1 (or the latest in SVN). The more feedback we get, the better chance we’ll have of making this our last Release Candidate.

This week Shaun made some great improvements to the Resource tree, reducing the large quantity of JSON data that was being sent across the wire, as well as reducing the need to refresh the tree as often. This optimization work is not yet complete, but the initial results are a distinctly noticeable improvement in performance when working with any page that contains the tree views (which is almost all of them).

I also optimized two of the most used functions in the core, modX::getChunk() and modX::runSnippet(), by providing a per request cache for the modChunk and modSnippet objects that are called more than once. The speed improvement only affects Snippets or Chunks that are called multiple times in a single request, but is significant especially when using those functions in a loop or using a particular Chunk or Snippet tag multiple times per page.

There is a lot more going on I need to talk about, and I’ll provide some more updates very soon. But for now, back to work.