Beginner – The Coding Pad

MODx Revolution for Complete Beginners Part 1 – Introduction

This is the first in a planned series of tutorials covering MODx Revolution 2 for complete beginners from the ground up. MODx Revolution is the new branch of the MODx CMS that’s built on a whole different code base than MODx Evolution. According to MODx founder Ryan Thrash: “MODx Revolution is a completely new MODx. It retains the soul of what makes MODx a great platform for building custom websites and rich applications, while enabling you to do more and to do them better. MODx Revolution 2.0 is more powerful, can handle high-volume sites, and offers the ability to handle multiple sites and subdomains from one install.” (The Revolution Starts Now)

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How to Install MODx CMS – Screencast

In this screencast, we will go through the process of installing MODx CMS. While we will do this install on a local development environment using WampServer, the steps for installing on a remote host are exactly the same with two notable exceptions:

On a remote server you would use an FTP client or something similar to upload the files
Most hosts will add a prefix to the database name and database username, so you need to make sure you enter the full name including the prefix when preparing to install.

While MODx can create the database for you, I have found that this doesn’t always work on some servers, so in this screencast I create the database separate from the install and just let the installer detect and connect to the database I’ve already created. I hope you find this screencast helpful.

Useful Links:

Beginner’s Corner Part 1 – Setting Up a Local Development Environment
Beginner’s Corner Part 2 – Creating Projects, Databases, and Users
MODx Beginner Tutorials

Best Resources for Learning PHP from the Ground Up – Newbie Goodies

I’ve been teaching myself PHP on and off for a while now, and in the process I’ve amassed sources and links, some of which have been very useful and others very frustrating, with some in the middle. There are numerous blogs, websites, and forums out there from which you can pick enough information to build a complete project and call yourself a PHP guru, and I think I have probably looked at most if not all of them, and have many of them bookmarked somewhere. In this post I plan to share what I have found to be the best (mostly free) resources for a complete beginner to PHP.

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