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 the MVC pattern


You might not have noticed but, we did use parts of the MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern before when we built our first block. A block consists of a controller located in a file named controller.php and a view, by default named view.php. There can also be more views in the templates directory, which are called custom block templates in concrete5.

In concrete5, most pages are created from a page type. It's what you mostly do when you add a new page in the sitemap, but there are single pages such as /login and /dashboard as well. Their functionality is usually unique, and thus called a single page. A single page is what we're going to create when we print output from an application in concrete5, which follows the MVC pattern.

Why MVC? What are the problems MVC tries to solve?

  • Different elements of the application have been included in a single file: the application logic, as well as the layout. There's no obvious structure in the application, therefore making it...