MODx updated on opensourcecms.com :)

Hi guys,

I just saw that the MODx demo has been updated @opensourcecms.com
I don’t know who took care of this (I suspect Ryan asked Chanh) but that’s great !

I have been unable to keep on working on the modxcms.com update, as you may know I am undergoing a brain upgrade so that I can finally get my hands dirty in PHP code (after two, days, I am FINALLY starting to get the hang of this, thank to the teacher Romain Bourdon (the guy who wrote WAMP Server, I am in good hands). I will get back to work on this as of friday pronto, I know it has to be ready in time for 0.9.5.1...

Anyway, back to the topic, I guess we’ll have a jump in new users with the demo upgrade on OSCMS

Edit : Seems like the demo has a problem -> too many failed logins : unable to login...
And also : it would seem like MODx Light Blue is back ? ? ?

Quote from: davidm at Dec 12, 2006, 01:10 PM

Edit : Seems like the demo has a problem -> too many failed logins : unable to login...
And also : it would seem like MODx Light Blue is back ? ? ?

Works fine for me, you know that the password has been changed? it’s now admin/demo123. And I couldn’t see MODx Light Blue at there.. I guess that something weird was temporarily going on when you visited there or it has been fixed now.. Anyways, great that we have the new demo at opensourcecms.com now, looks sweet.

You’re right, I have witnessed a glitch, probably just when they updated the thing, works allright now !
:)

Very nice! ... good luck with php training David!

This is the last day today but it’s a good jumpstart and that’s what I needed !
The training program is really dense (my head feels like it’s going to explode !), but I am not disappointed, Romain is a great teacher (and probably, his company will become a partner of mine, good contact there )

Now I’ll have to pratice a bit before producing anything valuable of course...
In a few months I’ll do a second (longer and harder) training session, which goes deeper (best pratices, optimization, security) and adresses PHP OO programming (which my current training does not ) and also PDO (;D), XML, SOAP . Last but not least, this second training grants you a Zend PHP Certification Voucher (but obtaining certification is not my primary goal...it feels like a far, far objective right now )

The goal, for me, is to be ready in time to make the best out of Tattoo / MODx 1.0
Anyway, now that I am jumpstarted, I’ll do a lot of exercices... coding hours ahead in the following weeks !
Also, reading the MODx snippets, plugins and modules and the core files with a "new" eye

Heh. I just did my first SOAP application this week, for CubeCart actually, but made it a module so it can be ported easily to a MODx snippet. Did two versions, one for sites with SOAP included in the php, and one using the nusoap library. Fun stuff!

Wow!
Congratulations David!
I can’t wait to see some of the apps you are going to come up with. With your knowledge of MODx and the great ideas you share here, I can only imagine that you are about to change our world again. This course you are taking sounds REALLY interesting. I learned PHP (obviously not very well, LOL) basically from talking with forum & core team members, reading tutorials online, and the book Teach yourself PHP in 10 minutes from sAms publishing. That book changed my life (and I would be willing to mail it to anyone who is interested in reading it. The book was so helpful to me, I will even pay postage!). But I would LOVE to attend a formal seminar style event like you are engaged in. If you have some time (and I know it’s in France, but I would still love details) would you PM me some details about it OR start a new forum thread (possibly a public viewable thread) about the journey and struggles of learning PHP as the foundation of getting the most from MODx. That would be awesome!

-sD-

Wow Susan nice to know but I am nowhere near SOAP right now
It’s part of the second training, which will not occur for another 6 months...


Thanks Scotty !

Well, this training is sure something that I needed to get started with PHP : though I have tried, I have never been able to pick it up along as you did (and BTW, I sure don’t consider your contributions as a testimony of "not very well learned", look at the huge success of MaxiGallery among others. Always been amazed by the speed you picked PHP up !).

Anyway, I never had to sign up for training before, being mostly a self taught person as far as the web is concerned... I don’t expect to come up with anything significant in PHP before weeks, months possibly (thanks for the vote of confidence, though !). Remember I have started a business about a year ago, and I have trouble making time for all those things I want to learn and practice, unfortunately...

But I have set to overcome my struggle with PHP, and this training was really a nice quickstart. It didn’t include OO, though, thus the plans I have to go ahead and have another session later (if I manage to build up on the first training... not sure yet, I didn’t "see the light" per say. It started clicking, is a good thing since it had failed so far, for me...).

Frankly, I am not sure if it were not for MODx and the fact I want to go deeper into customizing solutions for my client, I would have invested the time and money in this... My goal is to be ready to take advantage of the upcoming MODx version, thus the second training with OO programming and PDO

I love the idea of sharing the struggles of learning PHP, though right now I don’t have a lot to say, only did some "academic" exercises such as using forms (now I know about $_GET and $_POST lol, and I finally have a grasp on associative arrays) and building validation, building a login page, using sessions, building basic SQL request and getting the result into an array...

The "hardest" thing I did today was build a simple product catalog with pagination (things I could do easier with MODx and no PHP, lol... there I struggled with errors for 30 minutes to do it...), taking advantage of librairies (fpdf or gd)... I am by no means "fluent", but now PHP does really make sense when I read code and I am starting to get the hang of it... which is a suprise to me, new world opening up !

PS : Thanks for the "teach yourself PHP in 10 minutes" link, I’ll sure look at it !
Quite curious in fact, hearing your praise about it...

I actually had no idea you could get a PHP qualification until you posted about that voucher earlier... a quick bit of research showed that there’s not many people with one in France (under 50), and not many more here in the UK (90ish, if memory serves).

I’ve no idea whether I’d pass either the PHP4 or PHP5 test... probably not because I tend to rely on Googling php.net for syntax. That’s partly because I still have a major client site in VBScript, and of course there’s JavaScript and SQL as well, so I often have to double check I’m using the right language... I probably even think in AmigaBasic sometimes. That said, PHP is a fairly hideous mish-mash of naming conventions so it’s no surprise I get mixed up.

But at least once you have a comprehension of programming (a mental pseudo-code) you know what you’re looking for.

Yeah I know, not many people... it appears it’s build on the same certification model that exist for MySQL, though it would seem it’s still in its infancy. It’s probably just a way for Zend to make some bucks, and yeah it seems like it values knowing the syntax... I totally share the belief that it’s not the essential part of the language !

As I said, I really don’t care about being certified (if I make it to the second training, and find the funding... 2500$ This one already costed me 1800$), but as you say having an understanding of the mental process required to achieve something useful in PHP

@Scotty : I just ordered the book @amazon.fr, I’ll tell you if I loved it as much as you did