MODX campaigning in the Netherlands

Being at the frontline of the Dutch MODX propaganda machine for a while now, we know it’s hard to get attention for a CMS which is barely known in the Netherlands. We, Sterc, are making some progress now though!

It’s of the utmost importance to get more users and developers for MODX. We’re trying to get more users by holding talks for our partners and interested clients. Last friday was the first talk at MediaCT’s office, followed shortly by my talk at Traffic Builder’s office. Both companies are well known and highly respected firms in the Netherlands, so this could mean a real good start for our MODX campaign.

Friday Afternoon Session at MediaCT HQ in Groningen

The MediaCT MODX Friday Afternoon Session was streamed live and is also viewable on ustream at this very moment. There were 36 people in total, 18 in the room and 18 online. Slides can be found on Slideshare (Dutch slides).

The FAS keynote was focussed on developers and most questions from the audience were about how implementation was done. The most popular questions was about versioning for the content field, which is currently missing in MODX. Time for a feature request I guess!

Private keynote for Traffic Builders in Almere

The Traffic Builders keynote was private for Traffic Builders (TB) employees and a selection of interested clients. This particular presentation was more end-user and SEO focussed; More focus on TV’s, caching and form customization. All TB’s employees are SEO and/or SEA specialists and I managed to leave some very excited people behind.

Want a MODX introduction at your company or congress?

If you’re interested in MODX and want me to pay your company or congress a visit for a talk, just drop me an e-mail at gp [at] sterc [dot] nl

How to start learning Magento

A fellow developer asked me how to start with Magento, as in “Where the hell do I start?”. Usually I tell people to RTFM or buy a book. That’s rather hard in the case of Magento, because documentation is really bad or simply missing. I have to give them credit for finally starting some serious documentation/how-to’s in their new knowledge-base.

Reading books about Magento is a dangerous path to take, because of the fast release cycle of Magento. Books released yesterday, might be out of date tomorrow. At the time of writing, the only up-to-date book for Magento 1.4 are:

• None
• at the
• moment

There are however many 1.3 books to choose from, so you might try your luck there. Please note that the database structure of Magento has some big differences between 1.3 and 1.4. You should expect changes in the API too because of this.

So, to recap: we have a very complex e-commerce application, we don’t have any up-to-date books and the manual simply sucks sucked… Peter to the rescue! There’s still a way to get into Magento and that’s by doing two things. Watch out, it requires reading!

First off, read the new tutorials in Magento’s new knowledge base. This should give you a good idea about the complexity of Magento and enlighten you with some of the logic behind the complexity.

Magento - Template Path Hints

Secondly, turn on the best feature of Magento: “Template Path Hints”. It fixes the most common Magento issue during theme development: “Where in my file tree do I find that block???”. Template Path Hints show you all the locations of your blocks in the front end of your shop. See the video below for a brief how-to.

An extra useful tip would be to learn Zend Framework. Magento is based on Zend Framework. Learning and understanding Zend Framework should make your Magento career a lot easier.