DEVTRENCH: Web Development from the Front Lines

I’ve been busy writing and have launched two new tutorials:

MODx Templating Strategy is tutorial that will show you a best practice for developing scalable templates in MODx CMS.

PHP Tools of the Trade is for PHP beginners and will let you in on all of the software and server knowledge that you need if you want to learn PHP.

These are the first two tutorials that I’m launching on this site after the redesign and I’ve got more on the way.  Enjoy.

Sometimes when starting out a new Wordpress theme it’s nice to have something to start from that’s pretty bare, but has enough code so that you don’t feel like you’re reinventing the wheel.  I know there’s lots of blank themes out there, but I created my own and this is what I usually start from.  It’s basically the default theme, stripped down with reset and typography CSS from blueprint.  This theme has very little – almost none – html markup, but includes the common php tags wordpress uses to display content.  This makes it ideal to start from because you just have to surround the php tags with your XHTML code.

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I want to be honest with you, I’ve kind of been putting off writing my review of MODx Web Development from Packt Publishing. I actually finished the book about a week ago and just felt like I had to give it some distance so I didn’t totally bash this book. It’s not really fair to the author to just outright say that this book isn’t good because they put some thought into it and worked hard. But if I would have written this post a week ago, that’s all you would have heard.

Here is the quick list of pros and cons and further on is my impression of the book.

Cons

• The book starts out as a reference guide and ends up as a ‘how to make a blog’ tutorial.
• It doesn’t go very in depth on more advanced topics. Here is a list of things it doesn’t cover at all or very well:
  • Templating Strategies
  • Snippet, Plugin, and Module Coding Strategies
  • Using the MODx apis
• It NEVER mentions the full set of document variables, or system variables that are available. Not even in an appendix (of which there are none).
• Advanced users of MODx are going to be let down by this book. I didn’t learn anything new about MODx from it.

Cons Overall: I felt that the book was edited poorly, didn’t include enough advanced information, and was incomplete.

Pros

• It covers a wide variety of topics. The author touches on almost every aspect of MODx including the most common snippets and plugins.
• The book gives links to community resources such as the forum and wiki.

Pros Overall: I think if you are new to MODx, then the book would help you to learn it.

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