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I’ve recently had the chance to read the latest SilverStripe book:

SilverStripe 2.4 – Module Extension, Themes, and Widgets: Beginner’s Guide

I found this book very well written and entertaining. The author does a great job highlighting the SilverStripe way of building websites, and a good book explaining a good CMS is a very enjoyable read. But let’s see the book contents in more detail.

We start with the first thing new users may wish to learn, that is customizing the layout of our website. To make the journey in SilverStripe land more interesting, the author lets us build a complete project, a bar website.

To customize the site layout we learn to know the standard BlackCandy theme, and the Silverstripe template engine that allows us to build our own themes.

The following chapter explains the MVC structure of SilverStripe. MVC, meaning Model – View – Controller, is a popular software architecture that cleanly separates the presentation, the control logic and the database in a software application. Armed with this knowledge, we learn how to build our first SilverStripe page, using the View and the Controller layers.

Next we learn the Model, that is accessing the database for storing and retrieving information, and extending the model to suit the needs of our site.

SilverStripe is very extensible, if we add widgets and short codes. We learn how to use them, and how to build ours if necessary. Along the road we also learn how the SilverStripe cache works, and how to use it to improve our site performance.

Modules are more complex and powerful extensions for our SilverStripe site, and again we learn how to use available modules and how to build our own. The book lets us build an image gallery module for our bar website, and package that module so it could be distributed independently.

Many SilverStripe modules are already available, and among them we can find modules to add blog, forum and e-commerce functionality to our site.

But our site won’t reach its full potential if we don’t add interactivity, so we need SilverStripe forms. We learn how to create and display a form, and how to get and process the user input. We can also add automatic client-side validation, or custom client-side validation using the jQuery Validation plugin.

Last but not least, we learn how to localize and internationalize our project. Now we can go forth and build great websites with SilverStripe!

If you liked MODx Web Development, released by Packt on March 2009, you’ll also enjoy MODx Web Development – Second Edition, published on March 2011 and now available, see MODx Web Development – Second Edition.

This second edition offers a much needed update from MODx 0.9.6.1, covered in the first edition, to MODx Evolution 1.0.4.

The book is written for the novice MODx user, and offers a lot of screenshots, almost one per page. All these screenshots have been updated, and the new MODx terminology is now used (e.g. Documents are now Resources).

The book does not assume any prior knowledge of site development, and explains how to build a site with MODx using many step by step examples.

First come Resources and Containers (the basic elements of a MODx site) and templating (the way to style those elements according to our preferences and needs).

Then the author introduces the authentication and authorization of users, and explains Snippets, powerful tools to enhance our MODx site. Two important built-in snippets are presented: Ditto, which enables content aggregation (including tagging and feeds), and Wayfinder, which builds a variety of Resource lists, useful for instance to build navigation menus.

The final chapters are more interesting for advanced users: they discuss the PHx notation, ways to integrate forums or image galleries, and how to create snippets, plugins and modules.

Last but not least, a quick peek on the new MODx 2.0 is offered. We hope that will be the subject of the third book edition!

In 2007 MODx won the “Most Promising Open Source CMS” Packt Award. A little more than one year later, the MODx Web Development book has been published, to fulfill the expectations of many interested readers.

MODx Web Development is the first book available on MODx, and will undoubtedly contribute to spread the knowledge of this emerging CMS. Once again, Packt Publishing does a great job promoting Open Source Software, and MODx especially deserves such a promotion.

But let’s have a look at the book itself. The author, Antano Solar John, is active in the field of consulting, education and training, and the intended audience of the book are readers new to MODx or less experienced with this platform. But even advanced MODx users will find something interesting, especially in the last chapters.

After explaining how to install MODx, the book proceeds to present Documents and Containers (the basic elements of a MODx site) and templating (the way to style those elements according to our preferences and needs).
Each concept is presented without assuming any prior knowledge of site development, with many step by step examples.

After the basics are covered, the author introduces more advanced features, like authentication and authorization of users. This chapter is available for all to read in Sample Chapter 5, and is a good sample of the clarity of the whole book.

Next comes the explanation of snippets, powerful tools to enhance our MODx site. Two important built-in snippets are presented: Ditto, which enables content aggregation (including tagging and feeds), and Wayfinder, which builds a variety of document lists, useful for instance to build navigation menus. Many more MODx snippets are available, whether in the MODx package or as a separate download, and we learn how to search for the snippets we need, and how to install and use them.

The last chapters put the finishing touch on our MODx learning journey, and are probably more interesting for advanced users, since they discuss the PHx notation, ways to integrate forums or image galleries, and finally creating snippets, plugins and modules. Search Engine Optimization and Security are also covered.

Conclusions? Well, given the clarity of MODx Web Development and the features of MODx I’m really thinking about developing a MODx site myself!

If you are going to build a website for the first time, and you wish to use Drupal, a good book like Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6 is an invaluable help.

This new book, written by David Mercer and published by Packt, walks you through the many steps required to successfully build your Drupal website, from setup of a development environment to deployment and management of the final public site.

You start installing Drupal with Apache, PHP and MySQL on a test machine, so you can work offline while you experiment with Drupal and develop your site; then you become familiar with Drupal basics (Modules, Blocks, Menus) and start adding functionality to your site.

Almost without realizing it, you are absorbing the Drupal fundamentals, and you start to appreciate the power and flexibility of Drupal that otherwise could scare a new user away.

Next you go on configuring your site: the topics of clean URLs, error reporting, file and image management are clearly explained and put into practice. A new chapter is then devoted to understand the Drupal access control mechanism, with Roles and Permissions, Access Rules, and general User Account administration.

But, what about adding content? Don’t worry, you are now ready for that, and the author offers you two whole chapters, Basic Content and Advanced Content, to let you become familiar with Drupal content types and content related modules, like Aggregator and Book, Taxonomy and CCK (Content Construction Kit).

As you can see, the author consistently provides the reader with an easy path to climb the Drupal learning curve, carefully organizing the progression of topics and alternating bits of theory with examples and practice.

To complete the journey, the next chapter is devoted to Drupal themes, probably the most creative part of building your new site.

In conclusion, this book is a great resource for beginners, but also intermediate Drupal users won’t be disappointed, as the book covers topics like the Content Construction Kit, Actions and Triggers, and even jQuery. In the words of Dries Buytaert: “Reading this book won’t make you a Drupal expert, but it will give you a solid base from which to build.”

For additional information, you can read the page Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6 on the publisher’s website.

What’s the difference between a successful CMS and a Web Application Framework? Not a big one, I think, for the reasons I’m going to explain in this post.

Let’s start with the definitions. A content management system (CMS) is a web application used to manage and deliver the content of a web site. A web application framework, on the other hand, is a reusable set of code libraries and tools designed to support the development of web applications.

So one might think that a CMS could, or could not, be developed using a framework, and that’s perfectly true, but it’s only part of the whole story.

Things start to get more interesting when we look at a cornerstone feature of successful content management systems, that is their ease of customization and extension. Very often designers and developers need to tailor their CMS, so they tend to prefer those exposing a clear structure and a documented API, in much the same way as an application framework.

The resulting system could well be a content management framework that, out of the box, behaves like a blog platform or a basic CMS but, under the hood, retains the full capabilities of a framework ready to be used.

Real life examples abound. Many systems already advertise themselves as being a content management framework, rather than simply a CMS, from Drupal to PostNuke to eZ publish to SilverStripe to Joomla! to MODx. Even blog platforms, like b2evolution, offer an embedded framework for their users to build upon.

The next logical step is a CMS built using an independently available application framework; both systems, the CMS and the framework, would greatly benefit from the sinergy and the added visibility. Today Plone is probably the only CMS built upon an independent framework (Zope CMF), but that is changing.

A few months ago the Mambo team announced their decision to build Mambo 5.0 using the CakePHP framework. Lately Typo3 announced they are developing an independent framework, Flow3, to build their next 5.0 release. And EllisLab has just announced that ExpressionEngine 2.0 will be based on CodeIgniter, their application framework already available as an independent product.

In my opinion, this trend is going to accelerate, and the most successful Content Management Systems will be strongly tied to a successful Web Application Framework, in a mutually beneficial relationship, and to the best advantage of designers, developers, and final users.