concrete5 Beginner's Guide covers everything you need to build your own website with a number of customizations and add-ons built from scratch, for those who need a pretty site that also offers some slick functionality.
concrete5 is one of many CMS' out there, but it manags to shine with a number of ideas and impressive solutions. For example, there's a very intuitive in-site editing concept where you can manage the content of your site in the actual layout of it and don't have to understand a complicated backend. The book gives you a quick introduction about this concept, but is focused on developers with the intention to build websites and-applications.
You'll therefore need some experience as a web developer, if possible with the technologies used by concrete5: PHP, MySQL, and jQuery. Experience with concrete5 isn't necessary though. The book guides you step-by-step from installation to the customization, and even to the creation of add-ons.
As you'll see towards the end, the packaging system of concrete5 you use to build your add-ons is very powerful and, thanks to the marketplace, you can easily popularize your own work and, if you want, also get some money by selling your add-ons.
Chapter 1, Installing concrete5, helps you to get a test-site running on your local computer, from where we'll continue to work with concrete5.
Chapter 2, Working with concrete5, discusses the basics of concrete5 you need to know to manage the content of a site, basically a compression of an end-user manual.
Chapter 3, Managing Permissions, looks at the powerful permissions of concrete5. You'll learn how to restrict access to a part of your site as well as allowing editors to see parts of the managing interface of concrete5.
Chapter 4, Managing Add-ons, explains what an add-on is and how you can install them from the marketplace.
Chapter 5, Creating Your Own Theme, shows how to convert an existing HTML layout into a concrete5 theme.
Chapter 6, Customizing Block Layouts, looks at ways to customize block layouts—blocks are layout elements in concrete5—making them look well in your own theme.
Chapter 7, Adding Site Navigation, teaches you how to add a dynamic navigation to your website.
Chapter 8, Creating Your Own Add-on Block, teaches you to create your own block, and the content elements of concrete5 from scratch.
Chapter 9, Everything in a Package, discusses how packages make it easier to work with add-ons that contains different things. We'll wrap a few things we've created in the previous chapters into a package.
Chapter 10, Dashboard Extensions, teaches you how to extend the dashboard, which is the place in concrete5 where you manage users, settings, and a lot more.
Chapter 11, Deployment and Configuration, explains how to copy the site from the local computer to a live server and also explains a few configurations.
You're almost free to use any kind of tool you want. The screenshots in this book were taken on a Windows computer but Mac OSX as well as Linux works fine as well. A text editor such as Notepad++, a web server such as Apache with PHP and MySQL, and an FTP client such as FileZilla are all you need.
This book is aimed at developers, knowing the basic web technologies such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP required to master the content of this book. Experience with concrete5 isn't necessary but it's helpful to have some experience with PHP and possibly other PHP CMS.
In this book, you will find several headings appearing frequently.
To give clear instructions of how to complete a procedure or task, we use:
Action 1
Action 2
Action 3
Instructions often need some extra explanation so that they make sense, so they are followed with:
This heading explains the working of tasks or instructions that you have just completed.
You will also find some other learning aids in the book, including:
These are short multiple-choice questions intended to help you test your own understanding.
These are practical challenges and give you ideas for experimenting with what you have learned.
You will also find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "You may notice that we used the Unix command rm to remove the Drush directory rather than the DOS del command."
A block of code is set as follows:
# * Fine Tuning # key_buffer = 16M key_buffer_size = 32M max_allowed_packet = 16M thread_stack = 512K thread_cache_size = 8 max_connections = 300
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
# * Fine Tuning
#
key_buffer = 16M
key_buffer_size = 32M
max_allowed_packet = 16M
thread_stack = 512K
thread_cache_size = 8
max_connections = 300Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
cd /ProgramData/Propeople rm -r Drush git clone --branch master http://git.drupal.org/project/drush.git
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "On the Select Destination Location screen, click on Next to accept the default destination.".
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