Beginning web fundamentals, did you feel overwhelmed when you started out?

When you began with CSS and/or Javascript, did you feel overwhelmed? I’ve dabbled in the past with web design in general, and with all the info that’s thrown out there about it all it’s starting to seem like there’s no winning the battle.

I’ve tried a few management systems like Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, etc, but MODx is attractive to me because it allows me to go ahead and create a layout and sort of "inject" the management into the site after it’s been designed visually. That and it seems like every time a CMS is updated it breaks something in a site.

Right now I think I have about 15 years worth of method and tech to catch up to. Javascript and CSS are amazing, and I’ve dabbled with it without any actual projects to work on. But now with html5 and css3 on the horizon I feel that I might be left behind again only to play catch up again.

In summary I’m interested and want to have fun with it, but it looks like a loosing battle. Any advice? Any reading suggestions?

I wouldn’t say it’s a losing battle, just one you need to follow to avoid falling behind. If you learn HTML/XHTML and CSS you will be doing great, as HTML5 and CSS3 build on these adding things such as rounded corners, multiple backgrounds, and other coolness.

The best advise, just follow along as best you can and you will be fine. Oh, and using MODx is a great start too

Well i think you just have to accept the fact that unless web-development is your job it is very hard to keep up with everything that is going on. I would say there is a lot more to html5 and css3 than just rounded corners, multiple backgrounds, and other coolness And let’s not forget about mobile web development: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/smartphone-browser-landscape/ , major API’s etc. It can be pretty daunting.

That being said, it certainly is possible to get a grip on the current state of affairs and things to come. After that i would try to get some actual projects and get your hands dirty. You’ll find out soon enough if you enjoy it and keep your motivation going.

Here’s some light (html5) reading to get you started:

http://www.html5rocks.com/
http://diveintohtml5.org/
http://html5doctor.com/
https://github.com/paulirish/html5-boilerplate

Welcome!

That is a GREAT first post by the way...

I hope this thread gains traction. I think creating sites is more than just picking the right CMS or adding the latest eye candy technology.

Good sites cater to the user. How long does it take the user to figure out what the site is about and how easy is it to work your way around all the content? Is the site pleasing? Does the design and content make you want to come back? Does the site function consistently well across most of the modern browser and devices in use today? These are the important questions in my book.

If you can create a static site structure that answers yes to all these questions then I think you are ready to adding a great CMS like MODx to the mix...

Be patient. I didn’t get my hands on a computer until I was a grandmother, and the books and magazines I got were like reading Greek. I knew what the words meant, but the way they were put together were totally meaningless to me. Eventually it began to make sense, though. After a while I realized that I couldn’t be an expert on every facet of computer stuff, so I quit trying to learn everything from hardware hacking to various programming languages (object-oriented COBOL, anybody?) and settled down to web development with PHP, then narrowed it down even more to MODx about five or six years ago (how time flies!).

Then they came up with Revolution. <sigh>.

I don’t buy books any more, there are too many excellent web sites with up-to-date articles and tutorials on anything I need to work with.

Thank you all for sharing your experiences and thoughts. It’s great reading replies like these to stay positive. What brought me here to the MODx site in the first place was the idea of stepping up and digging into what I had always day-dreamed about. Building websites in some way shape or form.

I look to MODX right now as a great starting point to introduce myself to the language and terminology of data exchange in a dynamic sites while I dive into the front end mark up. I know I could easily spend hours throwing something together that’s "kickass", but like Photowebmax said, there are factors to consider in the overall experience on a site. One thing I’ve notice in the last few years of paying more attention to the visual layouts of most sites. Wordpress sites look like Wordpress sites, Joomla sites look like Joomla sites, etc. There are give aways, but I guess it’s to be expected. Content is king I suppose.

And like SiNNut said, there are a lot of factors to consider. Right now I’m trying to find my comfort zone. As in which direction I can go in that I will have fun with while being the best I can be at it. For now that’s front end design and hopefully MODx.

Time will tell. Thanks for the support and insight everyone!

Here’s to learning to be patient!

Quote from: sottwell at Dec 29, 2010, 03:55 AM

Be patient. I didn’t get my hands on a computer until I was a grandmother, and the books and magazines I got were like reading Greek. I knew what the words meant, but the way they were put together were totally meaningless to me.

The Drupal docs still look like that to me (as does about half the JS I see).

I don’t buy books any more, there are too many excellent web sites with up-to-date articles and tutorials on anything I need to work with.

:’( :’( :’(

My biggest issue has been the sheer range of choices I needed to make as a freelancer (I’ve worked in online for 16 years, but for most of the past 12 as a chief, rather than an indian - it’s been a hell of a re-education).

Platform was simple, as I couldn’t afford proprietary, and I hated my time programming in ASP in the 90s. So MAMP it was (as I’m on Mac - and I’ve sort of settled on Coda for my code editing, although I don’t really like it, truth be told).

As a CMS / website delivery tool, I used WordPress a lot before, but tbh the constant rate of updates, and the massive range of plugins, themes etc annoyed me - I found it impossible to decide which was the ’best’ tool for a specific job. I’d commissioned Silverstripe at my last employer, but I never really got on with their way of organising folders, their community is not as strong, and, well... beans. I discovered MODx by accident - a freebie client wanted me to update some stuff for him on his Evo site, which I did, and then I started playing around with Revo. Conceptually, it’s the simplest to understand for me - templates within templates, some programmatic, some not. Even the fact that there aren’t standard solutions for some things has been a blessing, as by digging around I feel I understand it a little more than I ever did WordPress. One of the particular things I like about MODx is the way that small discoveries make you feel you’re getting somewhere, and then someone else will post something, or I need to visit the API reference, and I realise I actually know almost nothing. But almost nothing in MODx will still get you a long way.

The next breakthrough was trying to address my core weakness - CSS. I settled on the 960 grid framework to make my life simpler. It also fits nicely with MODx - make grid template, populate grid template, simple. It’s probably the least pleasing and most frustrating part of my job, even without getting hung up on making things semantically valid or working with IE6. I hate it. I hate the illogicality of it. I hate the words ’hack’ and ’conditional IE statements’.

Javascript gives me the willies, but I will again try to stick to one ’method’, and so use JQuery where I need to. Unlike CSS, this usually extends to changing a parameter name or value, so I don’t mind living in fearful ignorance of what’s going on. It will forever remain at the back of the queue of ’things to learn’.

I owe a lot of my initial understanding to tutorials that sottwell, BobRay, Einsteinboi have posted - and especially the one on Nettuts about using 960.gs with MODx (Evo). And since then I’ve benefitted a lot of work that bruno17, markh, shamblett and others have put in, apart from the core team.

This is a very - HUGELY - long-winded way of saying that along with patience, you need perseverance. Pick a path and follow it. Try not to get disheartened (I spent 6 days howling in the wind about a SOAP problem recently that only resolved itself when I copy-pasted the same code over the code I’d written from another app) and spend as much time fiddling under the bonnet as you can. Sort your workflow out - it’s taken me longer than I would have liked to get a proper test-stage-live setup going. And good luck.

Interesting thread. There are some good views from differing angles here.

I am a photographer first and designer second. I am not a developer. Many of the clever folks on this forum are great code developers with good knowledge of scripting tools. I am pretty good at CSS and presentation but can’t script my way out of a paper bag...

But MODx is still my CMS of choice. It offers freedom. You can take your vision, design anything, build a static valid XHTML system and say "lets pour this into a dynamic CMS". MODx is the answer in my opinion. To me Wordpress and other CMS platforms usually reveal the systems they run on. Deviate away from the support scaffolding too much and you will have some very heavy lifting to do. MODx is a liberating alternative to all that.

MODx does attract a lot of developer framework people. That is a good thing or not a good thing if you lack experience and don’t know the lingo. The notion of a good CMS is it supposed to be powerful, flexible and useful. The trend these days is for sites to be more dynamic and feature rich. Most people who create websites are either more developer oriented or more design oriented. Its hard to be really good at both disciplines at the same time. I wish I was! MODx works for both camps for the most part.

The issue with MODx is that the documentation trails behind the speed of the project overall. Some of the documentation is sort of all over the place. You need to dig for it. But that effort will reveal new sources of information that might have eluded you otherwise. MODx now comes in two flavors which adds more confusion. Some of the syntax is different and many of the snippets are for one system but not the other. Some snippets are explained well and some are frustrating to figure out. But every, and I mean every CMS will require some study, time and experimentation.

The other critical factor is the support you will get from community forums. I tried some of the forums with the some of the bigger systems but I really felt at home here with the MODx forum. Most people are very helpful and patient. This makes a HUGE difference. Even if there was a better CMS I would not use it if the support forum was unwieldy, cliquey or unfriendly to newbies.

We may have drifted away from you initial point though. There are several skills worth knowing when it comes to building websites. IMHO, I think learning CSS is the most useful skill to know if you are going to build sites. CSS lays a big role in how you cater the site to the end user. I see so many sites these days that have way too much going on: multiple navigation systems, too many columns and boxes, etc. So many sites are overloaded with teaser boxes and every chunk of jQuery eye candy script under the sun. Just because there are so many new web technology features does not mean that sites should deploy them all.

You might fall into the "I need to develop something unique with custom applications" camp or "I need a flexible CMS that supports designing custom sites from scratch" camp. MODx caters to both ends pretty well in my book...

Great topic.

At some point, you have to face the fact, as I did, that you can’t really work on a web site without a very solid notion of how CSS works. Trying to make things look right in HTML is hopeless, and trying to do so with a weak understanding of CSS is almost worse. It can eat up hours and hours of your time as you flounder around trying things that don’t work and watching your beautiful design get trashed in one browser or another.

So, my advice to beginning web developers is to learn two things well: CSS and FireFox’s FireBug add-on.

I found this book immensely helpful: http://www.amazon.com/CSS-Missing-David-Sawyer-McFarland/dp/0596526873 for really understanding CSS.

Once you have it, install FireBug and start looking at web sites with it. Just click on the Inspect button (the little rectangle with the arrow in it at the lower left). When you hover over a page element, FireBug will show you exactly which CSS rules are controlling its look and placement (and which rules are over-ridden by which other rules). This will cut the time takes to solve CSS problems by a factor of 10 (at least) and help you understand CSS at the same time.

Another valuable step, if you’re using MODx, is to get at least some understanding of PHP. It’s not rocket science, and there are a number of good sources on the web and some excellent books (read the reviews at Amazon and find one that meets your needs).
If you want to learn PHP, one thing is essential (and I can’t stress this enough): a good code editor. *Do not*, under any circumstances, try to learn PHP by editing snippets in the MODx Manager. It will take forever, and you’ll end up hating PHP, MODx, and probably life itself.

A good code editor will show you your mistakes as you type them instead of letting you see an incomprehensible PHP error when you run the snippet. NetBeans is an excellent open-source editor. I’ve used NuSphere’s PhpEd for some time and it’s also quite good, but I’ve recently converted to JetBrains PhpStorm, which is astoundingly helpful for coding (though not free). Any good editor will also include CSS and HTML editors as a bonus.

When you write a snippet for modx, just put this for the snippet code in the Manager (make sure the snippet is called uncached !):



Then create a php file at that location and edit it with your code editor and have MODx open in another window to test the results.

You might think that a good code editor is only useful for experienced coders who need the advanced feature that are wasted on beginners. To the contrary, beginners need the editor’s help more than anyone. Even an average code editor will highlight your errors. The better the editor, the more intelligent the highlighting is. PhpStorm, for example, will put a little red squiggle at the point in a line of code where it thinks your problem is, and it’s usually right. If you’ve forgotten the semicolon at the end of a line, it will will put it there. If you’ve forgotten to close a quote, it will highlight the unmatched quote in pink. If you forget to put a dollar sign at the beginning of a variable name, it will tell you. It will alert you if you misspell a variable name, warn you if you use a variable that you haven’t set a value for, and even warn you if you set the value of a variable but don’t use it later in the program. If there are any PHP errors at all in the file, it will underline the filename at the top of the screen in red and you’ll know that there’s no point in trying to run it. As you might imagine, this not only saves you a *ton* of time, it also makes working on the code (or learning PHP) infinitely more pleasant and rewarding.

I will get off my soapbox now.