Book Image

concrete5: Beginner's Guide - Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

concrete5: Beginner's Guide - Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

concrete5 is an open source content management system (CMS) for publishing content on the World Wide Web and intranets. concrete5 is designed for ease of use, and for users with limited technical skills. It enables users to edit site content directly from the page. It provides version management for every page and allows users to edit images through an embedded editor on the page. concrete5 Beginner's Guide shows you everything you need to get your own site up and running in no time. You will then learn how to change the look of it before you find out all you need to add custom functionality to concrete5. concrete5 Beginner's Guide starts with installation, then you customize the look and feel and continue to add your own functionality. After you've installed and configured your own concrete5 site, we'll have a closer look at themes and integrate a simple layout into concrete5. Afterwards, we're going to build a block from scratch which you can use to manage a news section. We're also going to add a button to our site which can be used to create a PDF document on the fly. This book also covers some examples that show you how to integrate an existing jQuery plugin. concrete5 Beginner's Guide is a book for developers looking to get started with concrete5 in order to create great websites and applications.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Pop Quiz Answers
Index

Working with block add-ons


We've already seen a few blocks in the previous chapters. In case you forgot, a block is basically an element you can place in an area. Thanks to the really extensible architecture of concrete5, it's quite easy to create a new block and add new functionality to your website.

Blocks are just like anything in concrete5 built using the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. This makes sure that every element in concrete5 follows the same structure. A developer who builds add-ons for concrete5 should have experience with object-oriented programming and the MVC pattern.

Understanding the MVC pattern isn't very difficult but helps pretty much any developer. It basically makes sure that the layout (view) is in a file, split apart from the logic (controller) and the data (model). You can find more information about the pattern on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_View_Controller.

Block structure

What files does a block need?

This goes a bit deeper but might still...