Book Image

Creating Concrete5 Themes

Book Image

Creating Concrete5 Themes

Overview of this book

Creating a concrete5 theme isn't complicated if there’s already a HTML document. There are only very few PHP functions you’ll have to add, but those are powerful and give you a lot of freedom. As you’ll learn to create mobile ready themes, you’ll start to see that there’s almost no limit in what you can do."Creating Concrete5 Themes" is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with a number of examples that will teach you how to create powerful concrete5 themes, change the look of content block elements, and even make your site ready for mobile devices."Creating Concrete5 Themes" starts with a few words about the editing concept and architecture of concrete5 and then continues with the creation of a basic theme which gets extended with more and more elements until the theme is mobile ready.You will learn where to find the information necessary to get your own concrete5 site and then get a quick introduction to understand the idea of the in-site editing concept. We’ll then create a theme which is extended with features and more details as we progress. You’ll also see some examples to show you the process of overriding elements from the core without losing the ability to upgrade concrete5 in the future. Once we’ve customized every element in concrete5 to build a complete theme, we’ll have a look at responsive techniques to make your site ready for small screen devices such as mobile phones and tablets.  
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Creating concrete5 Themes
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Getting your own concrete5 site


If you already have a site of your own, you can skip this part. For those without a concrete5 site, you can start by checking out the trial option on the official site: http://www.concrete5.org/about/trial/. On this site, you can get your demo site up and running with just a few clicks. There is no need to download, install, or configure anything. While this is perfectly fine to get acquainted with concrete5, you won't be able to change the files of the system. If you want to get a first impression, go for it, but if you want to play around with the code and layout of your site, make sure you get your own site up and running.

In case you want to run your own site, there are official hosting packages where you get your concrete5 installation without any worries. Check the different packages here:

http://www.concrete5.org/services/hosting/

As concrete5 is an open source CMS, you can, of course, run everything on your own server. The most-used platform is definitely LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP). There are a lot of people who run concrete5 on different platforms such as Microsoft IIS. While it's usually not a problem to get concrete5 running as long as the platform supports PHP and MySQL, LAMP is the only officially-supported platform. If possible, make sure you work with Apache on Linux as it's also the platform where you're most likely to get support in case something doesn't work as expected.

You can find information about the installation process, as well as a number of tutorials for different platforms, on the following page:

http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/installation/installing_concrete5/

Tip

Quick installation guide for those who have worked with PHP web applications before:

  • You'll need a working LAMP environment.

  • You need to download the latest stable version from the following page: http://www.concrete5.org/developers/downloads/.

  • Extract all of the files to a temporary folder on your computer.

  • Use an FTP client, such as FileZilla, to upload all of these files to your web server. Make sure index.php is in the folder from which you want to serve your site (for example, http://www.your-site.com/).

  • Open that URL in your browser, you'll be shown a screen where you can enter the administrator's credentials as well as the information needed to connect to the database. Put the correct values in each field and confirm them by clicking on the Install concrete5 button.