Concrete5 Beginner's Guide : Create and Customize Your Own Feature-rich Website in No Time With Concrete5!

concrete5 is a superb content management system and this book will show you how to get going with it. From basic installation through to advanced techniques of customization, it's the perfect primer for web developers.

Overview

• Create your own theme to customize the look of your site.
• Create new blocks from scratch to learn how to embed new content elements in your concrete5 site using HTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript.
• Wrap everything in a package for easy handling and distribution of your add-ons.
• Learn how to install and set up a concrete5 website.
• Build block templates to change the output of blocks to suit your needs.

In Detail

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.

What you will learn from this book

• How to install concrete5
• Understand the configuration of concrete5
• What you need to know to build your own theme
• How you can turn the slideshow block into a gallery
• How to add a new dashboard page
• How to create new blocks from scratch
• How to put different elements into a package for easy handling and distribution
• What you need to know to use concrete5 in a different language
• How to deploy a local site to a production server

Approach

This is a beginner's guide, which takes a clear, step-by-step approach to guide you through the process of creating and adding functionality to your site.

Who this book is written for

This book is ideal for developers experienced with HTML and CSS and possibly PHP as well as JavaScript, who would like to build their first site with Concrete5. Some knowledge of PHP, MySQL, or HTML would be useful, but no experience with Concrete5 is expected.

Remo Laubacher

Remo Laubacher grew up in Central Switzerland in a small village surrounded by mountains and natural beauty. He started working with computers a long time ago and then, after various computer-related projects, focused on ERP and Oracle development. After completing his BSc in Business Administration, Remo became a partner at Ortic, his ERP and Oracle business, as well as a partner at Mesch web consulting and design GmbH. At Mesch—where he's responsible for all development-related topics—he discovered concrete5 as the perfect tool for their web-related projects and has since become a key member of the concrete5 community. You can find his latest publications on http://www.codeblog.ch/.

He has also authored concrete5 Beginner's Guide and Creating concrete5 Themes.