Teaching MODX to co-workers

General Tutorials
1

I am teaching new co-workers how to build sites in MODX. I hope to give them the skills to manage and troubleshoot our site. We host our site in MODXCloud so spinning up MODX instances is very easy.

Here is my general outline and topics covered:

Building a cloud

  • Create cloud from snapshot (already configured with snippets, media sources, system settings, and bootstrap/foundation files)

Build website

  • The website will be a employee directory
  • Build basic template for general content
    • template tags
    • chunks (header and footer)
    • wayfinder (navigation)
  • Build template for departments
    • Template Variables
  • Build template for employees
    • template variables
      • include resource TV (departments)
  • Make directory page listing employees in alphabetical order
    • getresources
    • build tpl chunk
  • Make department listing page
    • getresourses
    • tpl chunks
  • Modify Department template
    • use getresources to list employees in department

Does anyone have suggestions to add or anything I might be missing?

Thanks,
Roy

2

In the Russian-language segment of developers, almost no one uses outdated getresourses, wayfinder add-ons.

Use pdotools

3

You could add something about:

  • troubleshooting
  • clearing modx cache
  • checking error logs
  • using modDevTools to help understand how chunks, templates and TV’s are all working together
4

Totally agree. It probably doesn’t matter much on very small sites, but in general I’ve been switching all my sites to pdotools.

5

Thanks, we use both pdotool’s pdoresources and getresources. I planned on have a future session on converting to pdoresources. Most of our getresources call are cached with getcache.

6

Trouble shooting, clearing the cache, and error logs will be in future lessons. We have modDevTools installed and will be added to the sessions

Thanks