Forums / General / Guidance Counselor Needed

"Please Note:
  • At the specific request of Ibexa we are changing this projects name to "Exponential" or "Exponential (CMS)" effective as of August, 11th 2025.
  • This project is not associated with the original eZ Publish software or its original developer, eZ Systems or Ibexa".

Guidance Counselor Needed

Author Message

Brian Henkel

Saturday 19 April 2008 9:19:49 am

Hello,

I consider myself a web designer with intermediate knowledge of html/php, but I am tired of having my hands tied regarding changes to code and creating truly custom sites with Exponential. If you were my 'Exponential Guidance Counselor', what would you recommend in terms of making a transition from designer to developer?

I have reviewed the listings of books available -- Which one would you recommend in my case? The books are a bit outdated and focus on Exponential 3 -- since I'm using 4.0, how much value can they provide?

What are the best free resources out there to begin my learning?

Thanks, all

Brian

André R.

Saturday 19 April 2008 10:17:22 am

Exponential 4.0 is basically "just a" php 5 port of Exponential 3.10, so the concept of the CMS is still the same.

The most in depth book is "Learning Exponential 3", it's a bit outdated (written for Exponential 3.4), so it doesn't cover the "new" and simplified template language introduced in 3.6.
Other stuff it doesn't cover is static caching, native object translations support, class translations support and clustering support.

If you buy this book, here is a overview of the changes to the template system:
http://pubsvn.ez.no/nextgen/trunk/doc/features/3.6/improved_template_syntax.txt

Complete list of new features since Exponential 3.4:
http://pubsvn.ez.no/nextgen/trunk/doc/features/

Alternatively "Exponential Basics" is also pretty good and a bit newer (written for Exponential 3.8), but doesn't go that deep on advance subjects.

eZ Online Editor 5: http://projects.ez.no/ezoe || eZJSCore (Ajax): http://projects.ez.no/ezjscore || eZ Publish EE http://ez.no/eZPublish/eZ-Publish-Enterprise-Subscription
@: http://twitter.com/andrerom

Maxime Thomas

Sunday 20 April 2008 11:37:09 am

You can also get some information there :

http://ez.no/developer/developer_information

and

http://ez.no/services/eznetwork/development_guidelines

And specially the 'Standard' section which will provide more specific and harsh guidelines to correct development.

Cheers.

Maxime Thomas
maxime.thomas@wascou.org | www.wascou.org | http://twitter.com/wascou

Company Blog : http://www.wascou.org/eng/Company/Blog
Technical Blog : http://share.ez.no/blogs/maxime-thomas

Tony Wood

Monday 21 April 2008 2:45:26 am

Hi Brian,

I am a great believer of playing to ones strengths so I wish you luck in your learning.

A good place for info is here http://ezpedia.org/wiki/en/ez/developers

T

Tony Wood : twitter.com/tonywood
Vision with Technology
Experts in eZ Publish consulting & development

Power to the Editor!

Free eZ Training : http://www.VisionWT.com/training
eZ Future Podcast : http://www.VisionWT.com/eZ-Future

Graham Tillotson

Monday 05 May 2008 9:56:26 am

My advice would be to install the ezwebin (Website Interface) demo and then tear apart the templates to see how they work. First you need to get familiar with where templates are stored and how the override mechanism works, and then you can get into the template code.

There are many excellent examples of template code in ezwebin -- fetches, functions, calendars, object relations -- so you just need to start with them when building out a site to see how they work.

The PDF downloads of Exponential documentation are also excellent. Keep them local on your machine and search through them as needed for information and code samples.

DUO : CONSULTING
Web content management experts
www.duoconsulting.com