MODX Revolution Building the Web Your Way

Book excerpt: MODX Revolution: Building the Web Your Way presents an extensive look at an amazing and extensible Content Management Platform by providing real-world examples and hundreds of screen shots to bridge the gap typically experienced by users when pressing into new concepts and systems. Readers can approach this book as a quick reference, progressive primer, the basis to streamline team activities, or simply as a means to stretch skill sets into new areas based on the author's decades of experience integrating development teams and partnering with clients around the globe. MODX Revolution: Building the Web Your Way is divided into four logical sections allowing readers to quickly access topics via the outline formatted Table of Contents or the index. Each chapter progressively increases in complexity and builds on concepts previously presented in the text. Features introduced in MODX Revolution 2.2.x-pl: Media Sources, Dashboards, and file-based Elements have also been introduced. In short, MODX Revolution: Building the Web Your Way is the book the author would have wanted on his desk, since he began using MODX products in 2005, and what multiple people from around the globe asked him for. MODX Revolution: Building the Web Your Way is an example-driven guide which effectively walks readers through various aspects of administrating, using, developing, and designing websites. Everything necessary to successfully operate a MODX Revolution site has been included in this book with the intention of familiarizing users so they can rapidly begin developing their own applications. MODX Revolution: Building the Web Your Way is divided into four sections: Part 1: Foundations contains quite a bit of explanation and numerous examples regarding each of the topics necessary to become familiar with MODX Revolution. Part II: Live Projects begins with a quick-start chapter and moves into real world development examples incorporating jQuery, Ajax, Search Engine optimization, and various other topics for building better projects. Part III: Administration introduces the concepts and techniques to effectively administrate a MODX Revolution project. Access Control Lists and other ?difficult? topics are presented in a straightforward manner utilizing very familiar terminology to quickly establish concepts usually considered to be advanced simply due to their assumed complexity. Part IV: Development takes a ?stone tossed across water? view of building dynamic PHP applications using MODX Revolution as a foundation. The areas of discovery range from the most commonly used methods in the API, to building third-party applications from scratch - including the xPDO schema and extending the generated classes into full applications. Regardless of your skill level, this book was conceived with the idea of allowing you to begin at your current level of experience and continue as far as you would want to. The examples chosen for this book are intended to easily reach a large number of readers, especially those who are self-taught or who are looking for a "low-impact" learning curve. The author intentionally refrained from using overly technical examples and verbiage so as to relate to a larger audience, even though some of the topics may be considered advanced to some readers.