Tutorials – Page 8 – The Coding Pad

Beginner’s Corner Part 1 – Setting Up a Local Development Environment

In today’s screencast, the first of a series, I am going to go all the way back to basics and walk you through setting up a local development environment (the easy way) on your computer that will allow you to code in PHP, develop applications, and test scripts such as WordPress, Drupal, MODx, etc. This series of screencasts may be rudimentary for some of you, but I think that for the very rank beginners these may help lower the barrier to entering the world of web development.

Useful Links:
WampServer
XAMPP
MAMP

How to Update a Website from MODx 0.9.6.3 to MODx 1.0.0 – Screencast

In this screencast I will go over how to update a MODx Evolution 0.9.6.3 website to MODx Evolution 1.0.0 by taking one of my MODx sites and updating it while walking you through my process.

I don’t believe there’s a particular prescription to this, what I go through here is my own process. I look forward to your comments on how you do your updates, any suggestions on making the process smoother (if possible 🙂 ), and any ideas, questions, corrections and such.

More Reading:
http://svn.modxcms.com/docs/display/MODx096/Upgrading

MODx Evolution 0.9.6.3 and 1.0.0 Manager Backend Comparison

Welcome to my very first screencast ever 🙂 This screencast covers very briefly some of the differences between the manager backends in MODx CMS 0.9.6.3 and 1.0.0 and might be useful for anyone following the series of MODx tutorials who is using MODx Evo 1.0.0.

I recorded this this afternoon and will be very interested in getting your feedback and thoughts. Obviously I’m a complete newbie at this and there’s lots of room for improvement, but it was fun.

One thing I did notice is that there’s a bit of a time lag between the audio and the video especially in the second half of the tutorial, and even after a few takes I couldn’t seem to get rid of it, so any suggestions are welcome. I’m using Camstudio with the ffdshow Video Codec. This is best viewed in fullscreen format. You can also watch it on Vimeo (without annotations) here: http://vimeo.com/6521761

Building a Website With MODx for Newbies – Part 11: Adding Comments with Jot

Welcome to part 11 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
Part 10: Adding Search Functionality with ajaxSearch

As we work through this series we’re building a MODx resource site – Learn MODx, adding functionality and expanding our knowledge. So far our website looks like this:

One of the core things that is desirable in any modern website is user interaction. So far we’ve implemented a contact form to allow our visitors to contact us, but in this post we’re going to go a step further and create a way for users to comment on our library selections and share their thoughts about the books we’re recommending. You can use this to add comments to a blog, or any other content type that you desire.

Continue reading “Building a Website With MODx for Newbies – Part 11: Adding Comments with Jot”

Getting the Wireless Card to Work with Windows 7 on the Thinkpad T43p

In this post I’m going to go a little off track and talk about non-web stuff 🙂 I recently decided to take my old IBM Thinkpad T43 and wipe it clean so I could test the Windows 7 RC OS on it. I have only now started playing with it and testing it. The first challenge I have faced so far is getting the wireless card to work. However, I have finally resolved it with a little help from Google.

Here’s how you can get it to work.

Continue reading “Getting the Wireless Card to Work with Windows 7 on the Thinkpad T43p”