Posted by
C on April 6, 2009 at 8:55 pm.
I installed MODx on a test site a week or two ago, and started to port an existing site into it. Basic templating is very easy, but I began to doubt my ability to work with such a flexible system due to my lack of PHP knowledge. I made a remark on Twitter to the effect that MODx seems to be a developer’s CMS, and I’m no developer.
I only today saw a response to my tweet from one of MODx’s “evangelists,” David Mollière, who assured me that he believes it’s also a designer’s CMS, and that it’s very empowering once one gets beyond the learning curve.
So I started following David on Twitter, and saw him mention a series of blog posts on MODx for newbies being written by einsteinsboi. Well, that sounded right down my alley, so I clicked the link.
That was a stroke of luck, as it led to The Coding Pad and some very well-written tutorials. As of today, there are five MODx tutorials on the site, with a promise of more to come. I’ve gone through them this afternoon, using my original test site to practice on. I understand some things much better now, especially the usage of chunks and snippets.
Now that I understand these a little better, I am beginning to see David’s point about MODx. And I’m beginning to like it quite a bit.
So many thanks to David Mollière and einsteinsboi — & I can’t wait for the next tutorial!
Posted by
C on March 25, 2009 at 1:49 pm.
I’ve just returned from a 2-week trip to the USA to visit my Dad. I had a great time, and there were several things during the trip that made me think, “Okay, I gotta blog about this.” But can I remember now what they were? Of course not. Jetlag and brainfog prevail.
One thing I do remember, however, is reading about ModX, and now I’m trying to decide if it would be more useful to apply what limited brainpower I have left to learning it, rather than theming Wordpress as a CMS.
I think I jump back and forth between things too much. Javascript, PHP, Wordpress theming, and now ModX. Could it be that I have iADD – internetz Attention Deficit Disorder?
I guess I really need to just sit down, close all the curtains and windows (email, browsers, Skype, and Twitter windows, that is!) and READ for awhile.
That is, if the jetlag doesn’t put me to sleep.
Posted by
C on February 27, 2009 at 12:39 am.
I have been thinking about the ongoing debate about dropping support for IE6 in website design, especially in light of the launch of Stop Living in the Past. It seems to me there are two paths to ridding the world of the scourge that is IE6 (and its earlier incarnations, but I’ll just say IE6 for simplicity.)
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Posted by
C on February 26, 2009 at 4:14 pm.
Okay, we seem to be happily up and running on NSDesign.
The loading speed is incredibly fast now compared to the way it was on Thinkhost. So far so good, and a huge sigh of relief.
Posted by
C on February 23, 2009 at 4:13 pm.
I’m moving this site away from Thinkhost. My next post will be made from a real hosting provider.
I will keep my static sites on Thinkhost for now, since I’m still stuck with another 18 months of “service” from them, but no more Wordpress on Thinkhost.
I reckon that’s gonna save the NHS a lot of money because my blood pressure should go down a bit now.
Posted by
C on February 21, 2009 at 12:08 pm.
This site’s been down three times within the past 24 hours. I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve bought a hosting package or a virtual yo-yo.
Good thing I’m not trying to run a business site on it. I wouldn’t dare, with this kind of “reliability.”
Posted by
C on February 21, 2009 at 3:22 am.
I am helping a friend with the redesign & restructuring of one of her genealogy sites, and I’m putting it into Wordpress so its content can be more easily updated in the future. I’ve got the HTML & CSS set up in a custom theme, and I’m working on transferring the actual content from the original site into it.
Out of the 8 pages I’ve completed so far, 6 validate XHTML 1.0 Strict pretty much “out of the box,” but I had to remove 2 lines of HTML comments in another file before it would validate, because Wordpress kept generating closing paragraph tags after those comments.
It took awhile, but I think I finally figured out what was causing it: each of those comments were inside unordered list elements.* Moving the comments outside the unordered list made Wordpress happy, and that lovely green line finally showed up on validation instead of the Dreaded Red, so I was happy.
The other page, I’m admitting defeat on. At least for tonight; maybe for forever. It was a contact form. Again, Wordpress kept inserting closing paragraph tags into it, which threw off the validator. I lost count of the number of times I tried to fix it. Nothing seemed to work. So I’ve downloaded the Formbuilder plugin to try tomorrow. Fingers crossed it’ll work.
I’d try it tonight, but I can’t, because I’ve spent so long on this that it’s no longer tonight; it turned into tomorrow a good three hours ago.
*From reading the Codex and some support threads, it’s apparently all to do with the way that Wordpress filters out “invalid” code. Fixing it involves changing some of the internal Wordpress code at the moment. I am not sure I’m ready to get quite that adventurous just yet.
Posted by
C on February 16, 2009 at 1:48 pm.
The more I read, the less I know. Or perhaps I should say, “the more I read, the more apparent it is just how little I know, but things are starting to click.”
I’ve tried many times to get my head around Javascript. I just don’t think like a programmer, I guess. But I’ve decided to give it one more try, mainly because I’ve recently found the concepts of the separation from content of not only presentation, but also behaviour. (Another case of being a few years behind the cool kids.)
This attempt is going better than the previous ones. I’m using three main sources of information at once for the basics – Jeremy Keith’s DOM Scripting, Kevin Yank & Cameron Adams’s Simply Javascript (one of my five recent Sitepoint purchases), and Marijn Haverbeke’s Eloquent Javascript digital book.
I figure that if I don’t understand something in one source, maybe it’ll be worded just differently enough in one of the other two that I may actually understand it. (This is by no means meant to be a reflection on any of the books mentioned above — it’s a reflection on how my 50-year-old brain is processing new information lately.) I’m also doing lots of Googling.
This technique seems to be working. I’m understanding the syntax, and what arrays and functions are. There are still a few things that haven’t quite clicked yet, but I’m getting there. This is, believe me, a big improvement over my previous attempts.
Any suggestions as to additional resources would be more than welcome.
I *will* learn this.
Next in line: PHP & Wordpress templating.
Baby steps.
Posted by
C on February 10, 2009 at 1:36 pm.
I’ve just purchased five (5) PDF books I’ve had my eye on for awhile from Sitepoint, for $29.95USD. But the best part is that Sitepoint, who are based in Melbourne, Australia, are donating all of my purchase price to the Australian Red Cross Victorian Bushfire appeal to help the victims of the wildfires in Victoria. They’re doing this through Friday, 13 February, so please take a moment to check what’s available and do some good at the same time.
Well done to Sitepoint for their community spirit!
Posted by
C on February 7, 2009 at 9:24 pm.
That is the question that’s bothering me today. (One of them, at least.)
I have no formal education in web design, but I have taken a few distance learning courses on web design from a couple of UK universities. In the first one, HTML 4.01 was taught. In the other two, however, we were advised to use XHTML so our pages would be “future-proof.” We were even introduced to a tool for converting HTML to XHTML in one of the early lessons of one course.
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