Tag: PHP

MODx Evolution: Creating a Simple Custom Snippet Part 0 – Introduction

Welcome to this new series of tutorials on the MODx CMS where we’re going to be talking about creating custom snippets for MODx Evolution 1.0.x.  We’ve been building a website called Learn MODx and so far it’s just a simple but functional website.  We’re going to keep building on and enhancing this website.  Before we proceed, I should mention that I’ve already updated the Learn MODx website to the most recent version of MODx Evolution 1.0.2.  If you started at the beginning with me and still have your site running on 0.9.6.3, please take a moment to upgrade your site.  You can watch this screencast on how to upgrade your MODx site.

In this series on creating simple custom snippets, we’re going to look at the basics of creating your own snippets.  I’m no PHP guru so we’re not going to be doing anything crazy here 🙂 but I hope to give you enough information to jump start you into exploring and digging further to create bigger and better things and see how truly powerful and extensible MODx is.  At this point I assume you know what a snippet is and have probably already used some snippets in your own MODx websites.  (If you don’t know what a snippet is, please go over the MODx Beginner Series as that will help lay the foundation for this series).

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Beginner’s Corner Part 3 – Installing Scripts – WordPress, Drupal, etc.

In this third installment of the Beginner’s Corner series of screencasts, we’re going to put together what we’ve learned so far and start installing scripts on our local development environment.  We will learn the general steps that are involved in getting the scripts to run successfully on our local server.

In case you missed them, here are the links to the previous parts of the series:

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

Useful Links:
WampServer
XAMPP
MAMP
On Database Collation – http://oregonstate.edu/cws/docs/collation
How to Set Up Virtual Hosts on your Local Host

Beginner’s Corner Part 2 – Creating Projects, Databases, and Users

This is the second part of the Beginner’s Corner series of screencasts where we’re going back to basics and learning how to set up a local development environment.  In this installment, we look at how to create projects, where to put our project files and how to access them.  We also look at how to create databases and users in phpmyadmin and how to assign users to databases.

In case you missed it, here’s the link to part 1 of the series:
Beginner’s Corner Part 1 – Setting Up a Local Development Environment

Useful Links:
WampServer
XAMPP
MAMP
On Database Collation – http://oregonstate.edu/cws/docs/collation

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

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

learning

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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