MODx 2.0 Web Development on PacktPub

he should name it modx-web-2.0-development, or whateva, at least not attach that number behind modx without knowing the difference.

anyway, he’s a good business man.
he knew we needed a basic book, and he published whateva.

That’s all I do, irrespective of Contexts – “Business, Technology, People”

is he even registered as our community member?

He is.. I remember him posting here when his first book was discussed.

He told me on Twitter he already contacted Packt to see if the title could be modified, and before I saw that tweet I also sent an email to them asking to at least mention it’s a book about Evolution in the description.

I am new to ModX and I started with Modx Revolution. ’MODx Web Development’ didnt help me much. But some tutorial I found online helped me to understand basic amazing ways of Modx Revolution. A Good Book on ModX Revolution will change the history of all CMS. I believe some commercial support in training, additional extension development etc are not against the spirit of Open Source. Lullabout to Drupal shows that. I am waiting for a Real Good BOOK that give confidence to new developers to see the real ’Revolution’ in this CMS.

Thanks

There’s two books for Revolution on its way.

One by Bob Ray, and one by Shawn Wilkerson. Shawn’s book is expected near the summer, am not sure on when Bobs book gets published. Those two are probably the most proficient Revolution users in the community not taking into consideration the core devs, and I’m really looking forward to both books


Just got the following reply from Packt:

Thank you for contacting PacktPub.com.

We are aware of this error and it is being corrected immediately. We apologize for any confusion that may have been caused by this-it is an unacceptable error.

Let me know if I can be of any further assistance to you.

Just to follow up on this, the name of the book has in fact been changed

It’s now "MODx Web Development, second edition". Much better for clarity.

I am really upset. On page 191 it starts a discussion of using WebLoginPE, and has a direct link into my site’s webloginpe installation’s documentation files!

WebLoginPE has a nice support site. You may want to look at http://sottwell.
com/assets/snippets/webloginpe/docs/index.html.

I’ll have to do something about blocking access in my .htaccess file. I was thinking of just putting a redirect there (I don’t need it since I’ve got a copy of the docs in my MODx documentation folder on my desktop) since I don’t want my logs full of 404 errors if I just remove it.

I’m actually reading the book as I’ve been given a free copy to review and put a review on my site. So far I’m finding it obvious that the author is not a MODx user at all, nor apparently are either of the technical editors of this edition. There are a number of areas that will be very confusing to any new user; for example references to Wayfinder vary from wayfinder to Wayfinder to WayFinder, and QuickManager is referred to as "the DocManager module".

I’d change that file to include some sarcastic text about the book... and include a link to where-ever the documentation is at (like http://rtfm.modx.com/display/ADDON/WebloginPE which could do with some information now that I look at it, lol.).

But that’s just me

I thought about that, but instead I put this in my .htaccess file

Actually a Google search on "webloginpe modx" has that same link as the first non-modxcms.com link. I seem to remember somebody else linking directly like that until I asked them not to, so I suppose that’s where Google got the link from. So I can’t really blame them too much for putting the link in the book, although as I said, it does just underscore that the author is not a MODx user; any MODx user that actually used webloginpe would know that the docs are included in the installation.

Well although the first edition of the book was somewhat helpful it did seem to have a bizarre take on Modx. I had hoped for a definitive book on Modx Evolution by somebody else but might have to get it if the book is significantly different.

In my opinion the appalling level of documentation on Modx is the main thing that holds it back. There is no place I can find best practice, and some of the stuff in Modx reveals terrible programming (now removed from Revo the ticker is just a mess) and most is written by people that are not experts on programming (that is not to say that people haven’t been helpful, they have been very).

I for instance have some extra fields in my Modx database and a code to connect it with articles, I have no idea how to integrate this information except using single calls to the database which is highly inefficient. I just want a book, 50 quid or something with someone who is an EXPERT on PHP with high level skills explaining the full capabilities as it was designed to be used. I’ve got a feeling the way I’m using it is just a kludge of solutions that sometimes barely holds together (I’ve had server overloads and I don’t get THAT many visitors)

If Revo is to have this documentation I also want to know how to upgrade from Evo to Revo.

Although getting a basic site up and running on Modx was easy enough (which is what attracted me to it) getting my website http://www.chess.co.uk/twic/ even to the state its in now has probably taken years off my life.

I’m probably stuck with Modx now. But I probably would have gone with a system with many more books and better experts if I had had my time again.

Maybe MOdx is finally getting there towards maturity but all sorts of minor faults that cost days and weeks to fix certainly have diminished my confidence (custom dates was another nightmare and there were others). I need to upgrade my site again and to be honest I’m totally dreading getting back into the coding.

Bob’s book is going to be incredible.

While it’s certainly Revo oriented, it also covers Evo topics as well. We liked it so much we spent months trying to figure out how to make it THE official MODX reference and I’m happy to report that it will be published under MODX Press imprint and available in digital and treeware forms, and we’re already working on a German translation. We have a long-standing MODXer starting with us in a few days with a ton of print production experience (and I owned a prepress shop for a dozen years) and a 1500-plus-page Word doc to smash down into <700 pages of properly typeset readable text, but it should be done very soon. We couldn’t be happier about getting this to the community soon.