There is an abundance of information and tutorials out there to help any aspiring developer/designer learn from scratch how to do the things they want to learn to do. Heck, here’s a lot of information out there to help you discover WHAT it is you want to learn to do 
. And the best things about it is that most of it is free and easily accessible to anyone with an internet connection. What this means is that it is easy to assume that all one needs to embark on learning enough to build a career as a developer/designer/programmer is three things:
- Internet access
- The ability to use Google
- Time
- The will and discipline to learn
Gone are the days when you couldn’t really learn much of substance without going to school for a couple of years at least, paying tuition, buying huge volumes of books, and paying for expensive tools and software. Today, you almost never even need to buy a book, or so it seems. With numerous blogs and tutorial sites (written and video) out there, it seems like a simple matter to pick up all the skills you need, use free tools, and build yourself a career. In addition, most of the tools you will ever need to get started are free/open source, whether it’s compilers, IDE’s, etc.
As with everything else though, we need to put on our thinking hats and critically consider the pros and cons of this amazing accessibility that we have to knowledge.
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I’ve been spending some time in the recent past revisiting my knowledge of (X)HTML/CSS, and one of the big things I’ve discovered is that I have more I need to unlearn than to learn. I learned everything I know about building websites on the internet, by experimenting, searching w3c schools for syntax rules and tags, and learning by looking at other people’s source code. This is the first time I’ve actually bought and gone through a book on this stuff, and I am so glad I did – wish I has done so earlier! If you’re just starting out, or like me feel like you need to learn the right way, or just want a nice (X)HTML/CSS book for your collection, I have just the book for you, it’s HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions – A Web Standardistas’ Approach by Christopher Murphy and Niklas Person. This post is a review of the book.
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Tags: (X)HTML·Books·CSS
If you want to take MODx Revolution beta (or any other MODx release) for a test run without going through the install process for yourself, you can do so at MODx Demo, a website that lets you try out both the front end and the back end to get a feel for it.
Those of you who’ve been following my MODx tutorials already have a nice feel for Evolution but you may not have ventured into the world of MODx Revolution yet, so this is a great way to see what it looks like and get a feel for the changes.
Make sure you take a glance at the Demo limitations so you know what to expect.
Enjoy!
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Tags: CMS·Content Management Systems·Evolution·MODx·Revolution
Welcome to part 10 of our series of tutorials on building a website with MODx CMS. So far we’ve looked at:
Part 1: Introduction to MODx
Part 2: Installing MODx
Part 3: Working with Templates
Part 4: Introducing Chunks
Part 5: Introducing Snippets
Part 6: Introducing Template Variables
Part 7: Introducing Ditto
Part 8: More Ditto
Part 9: Adding a Contact Form with eForm
So far things are looking good on our Learn MODx website, and we’re adding more functionality and hopefully building our skills with each of these tutorials. My hope is that by this point you’ve developed enough of an idea of the way MODx works that you’re moving on and exploring on your own, building and testing, and hopefully you know some things that I don’t about MODx and it’s workings So far our website looks like this:
One of the things I find myself looking for in every website I visit is a search box or link. Whether the website is a massive knowledge portal such as Wikipedia, or a social networking site, a blog, or just a simple company website, having the ability to search the website and find the information I need without clicking through numerous links is very important to me. It then follows that I would like to add search functionality to the websites I build. This what we’re going to accomplish in this segment.
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Tags: CMS·Content Management Systems·Evolution·MODx·MODx tutorial
For those of us who’ve been using and learning the MODx content management system, it’s exciting to know that MODx Revolution 2.0.0 beta 1 is now available for download and testing There is no better time to jump in and get involved with MODx than right now!!
What is MODx Revolution?
MODx revolution is the new carnation of the MODx content management system. It features a completely new core code base and is supposed to be faster, more flexible, more powerful than the current MODx version (a.k.a Evolution)
Why the name Revolution?
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Tags: CMS·Content Management Systems·MODx
