The concrete5 Beginner's Guide will show you how to get up and running with concrete5 as quickly and painlessly as possible. Taking you from installation to deployment, this is the only reference that you will need for creating your new concrete5 site.
By using a number of real-world examples, as well as taking you through the set up of a sample site, this book will enable you to become familiar with all of concrete5's features. Use add-ons, themes, and blocks to give your site the look and feel that you desire. Simple PHP will enable you to customize the layout and navigation options of your site as well as extend the dashboard, giving you a fully functional, professional site in no time.
Chapter 1, Installation is all about the installation. You'll get a web server up and running on your local computer which you'll then use to install concrete5.
Chapter 2, Working with concrete5; before you start customizing the site a few words about using concrete5, the part which end users should know about concrete5.
Chapter 3, Permissions; concrete5 offers a lot of different permissions you can use to restrict certain actions on your site. You'll have a small protected section on your site once you're done with this chapter.
Chapter 4, Add-ons looks at add-ons: what types there are, where you can find them, and so on. This is the big picture before we start digging deeper.
Chapter 5, Creating Your Own Theme; every site has to have a personal touch, and this is where you'll learn how to create your own concrete5 theme to change the layout to the way you want it to be.
Chapter 6, Customizing Block Layout will show how concrete5 uses blocks as content elements. These elements can be styled as well as themes to get even more out of concrete5.
Chapter 7, Advanced Navigation; creating a navigation isn't complicated but there are a few things you have to know if you want to customize the navigation.
Chapter 8, Creating Your Own Add-on Block; while you can customize a lot by changing the layout, you might be in the situation where you need a completely new function in your site; check this chapter to get more information about that.
Chapter 9, Everything in a Package; being able to customize and extend almost everything can make things a bit messy. Have a look at this chapter to see how you can wrap things in a package for an easier handling.
Chapter 10, Dashboard Extension; block add-ons are great to manage the output of your site but sometimes there are things you have to do in the background. You'll have an extension which checks broken links in your site as well as a few smaller examples to manage your site.
Chapter 11, Deployment and Configuration; apart from a few configurations not needed on a daily basis, we're just moving the site and add-ons we've created so far to another server.
This book is ideal for developer who would like to build their first site with concrete5. You will need to be a little bit familiar with PHP, MySQL and HTML but will likely have little to no experience in using concrete5.
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 set 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: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
A block of code is set as follows:
<?php
for ($i = 0; $i < count($cArray); $i++ ) {
$cobj = $cArray[$i];
$title = $cobj->getCollectionName(); ?>When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<?php
for ($i = 0; $i < count($cArray); $i++ ) {
$cobj = $cArray[$i];
$title = $cobj->getCollectionName(); } ?>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: "If you edit a page, you can click on Design".
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