Indeed, if you look at the code and database, you’ll see that Chunks are called "htmlsnippets". Personally, I’m happy with the separation and the two terms, as "chunk" and "snippet" are easier to say than "HTML Snippet" and "PHP Snippet".
Quote from: lovingmodx at Nov 07, 2006, 01:29 AM
Yep, I agree on this. There should be some kind of ’TV’ that is universal, once created will be available to all documents (so it can no longer call TV, haha). I think of TV as some extra data that I can attach to my document, for example if all my contents is about books, I will create 2 TVs call ISBN and Author. It really has nothing to do with template. It is more an EV - Extra Variables. My friend created a TV and couldn’t find a way to use it the whole day, until he find out that he need to enable the specific template for that specific TV! So the logic behind TV is hard to grasp.
I’m confused - you say they’re nothing to do with templates and shouldn’t be called Template Variables, but then give an example of someone not realising that there needs to be some relation of the TV to the template! That’s why they’re called template variables - they are variables that are available with that template. You can already add your TVs to all available templates - although if you then add another template, you’d have to go around adding them. As far as I can tell, the benefit of restricting TVs to certain templates is to avoid having inappropriate variables on pages; it would probably confuse people to have ’GoogleMapReference’ available on your contact form edit page as well as the office branch pages. Or an ISBN on an Author Bio page. At the present time, the only way of distinguishing document format is template. Which makes perfect sense to me because "template" refers to structure and layout, not just layout. In most other systems, template just means look and feel. MODx does not have such a narrow view.
However, I can see that an an ’Available To All Templates’ option would be useful, and I can also see some benefit in making it the default in future MODx versions, as long as there is still the ability to restrict variables to appropriate subsets of documents.
Right now, this seems to be something that just needs documenting properly. I have great hopes for the Wiki being able to document things from multiple angles.
Quote from: lovingmodx at Nov 07, 2006, 01:29 AM
Please! Write some documentation and examples for ditto. The current documentation is a list of features (not documentation). There isn’t enough explanation, tutorials and examples!
Well, the author is busy, and his priority is the next version anyway. There’s an entire subforum dedicated to Ditto :
http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/board,180.0.html and I intend to summarise some of the problems and solutions over on the wiki. Hopefully other people will help with that.
Quote from: straty at Nov 07, 2006, 02:07 AM
I think all modules before getting listed on the site should have full install instructions and lots of examples and "how to do this" type of stuff. Also some of them need a requirements list, I installed a module that didnt work with mysql version that I had running.
If a module doesn’t have full install instructions and lots of examples, just imagine it isn’t there. Do that for all the add-ons that have not been documented to a commercial standard, and you’d find very little left. This is the nature of open source, I’m afraid. People are far more likely to share something they’ve just written to solve a problem they had if they’re not expected to spend possibly longer than it took to write the add-on putting together documentation themselves. Please, community, you can help with documenting things! Even if it’s just compiling a list of questions for others to answer, or letting the next person know that a module doesn’t work with a particular MySQL version. It all helps.