Since discovering concrete5 in 2008, not long after the project went open source, there’s been one community member that has been a tremendous help to not only me but I’m sure countless others and that is Remo Laubacher. From the beginning Remo has sacrificially given to the concrete5 community, always there to give an answer and help out. When I found out he was writing a beginner’s guide for concrete5, I thought there’s no better person to do this than Remo. And I was honored when he asked me if I’d be willing to review his book on c5mix. So, here is my review of Remo’s Concrete5 Beginner’s Guide.
Overall Rating: 4.5/5
About the Book
Concrete5 Beginner’s Guide by Remo Laubacher and published by Packt Publishing is a “step-by-step guide to creating professional, feature-rich sites with concrete5.” It covers a wide range of material such as setting up and installing concrete5 in a local environment, learning how to edit your concrete5 site, how to install add-ons and themes as well as how to modify and create them, working with permissions and users, extending the concrete5 dashboard with additional functionality, and moving your site to a live server. The book includes the following chapters: Continue reading →
I am happy to announce that we have two winners in our Concrete5 Beginner’s Guide Book Giveaway! The two people that have been randomly selected to receive a free copy of the book are:
Ilaria and Adam J
Congratulations Ilaria & Adam J!
Grab your own copy
You can go ahead and purchase your own copy of the Concrete5 Beginner’s Guide here.
I just released a little update to the Featured Content Slider that should fix an error that was happening based on conflicts with the image helper. The error this addresses/fixes is:
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class ImageHelper in /packages/c5mix_featured_content_slider/helpers/image.php on line 28
Full Release Notes
1.0.3 – Changed image helper name to feature_image to avoid conflicts/errors
We’re very excited to announce we’re giving away two copies of the new Concrete5 Beginner’s Guide book by Remo Laubacher!
About the Concrete5 Beginner’s Guide Book
The book is a great guide on how to get started with and customize your concrete5 site. Features of the book include:
- Follow the creation of a sample site, through the installation, configuration, and deployment of a Concrete5 site
- Use themes and add-ons to create a personalized site
- Ideal introduction to using the Concrete5 CMS
- Lots of practical examples, screenshots, and less of the waffle
Soon, we’ll be posting a full review of the book – so keep an eye out for it.
How to Win
Simply post a comment below stating why you think you should win a copy of the book. Make sure to leave your name and a valid email address so we can get in touch with you if you win.
Giveaway Details
This giveaway ends on Monday, June 20th, 2011. After that, the comments section will be closed. Please only comment once and make sure to leave your name and a valid email address. The two winners will be randomly chosen. We will be announcing the winners with a separate post after the giveaway ends.
Update 6/21/2011
The giveaway has ended and comments have been closed.
Our first add-on for concrete5 has just been released and we’re super excited! Take a moment to check out the demo or head over to the concrete5 marketplace to purchase it.
About the Featured Content Slider
The Featured Content Slider is a set of custom templates (a light and dark style) for the Page List block that allows you to create an auto-playing slider for displaying featured content.
I just released updates to five of our themes – Featurist, Clearview, Luminosity, CorporateAmerica, and OfficeSpace. Below are the release notes for each of the themes:
Featurist (Version 1.1)
- Changed #page div to #container because of conflicts with Page page type. Changed color of text in Header Top area.
Clearview (Version 1.4)
- Changed #page div to #container because of conflicts with Page page type. Created Left Sidebar page type.
Luminosity (Version 1.2)
- Changed #page div to #container because of conflicts with Page page type.
CorporateAmerica (Version 1.2)
- Changed #page div to #container because of conflicts with Page page type.
OfficeSpace (Version 1.3)
- Changed #page div to #container because of conflicts with Page page type. Added right_sidebar.php file and made Left Sidebar & Right Sidebar page types install automatically.
It’s finally here, my latest theme – Featurist. I’m real excited about this one; it’s got some really cool features that I think everyone will like.
Features
- Built-In Featured Content Slider on Home Page
- Tableless, 960px grid-based layout
- Clean, professional design
- Works in all major Browsers
- 4 Color Variations (Blue/Green, Pink/Blue, Red/Purple, Gray)
- 7 Different Page Types / Layouts (Home, Left Sidebar, Right Sidebar, Full, Three Column, One over Three, One over Two)
- Automatic, Animated Drop Down Main Navigation
- Animated Sub Navigation
- And more…
Find out more about the Featurist Theme
On a recent site I was working on I needed to be able to display a page’s grandparent page name on that page. I wanted to be able to have it display automatically so the end user would not have to add it to the page each time. Here is an example of what I’m talking about.
Suppose you have a sitemap that looks like this:
- Collection One
- Product One
- Product One Detail
- Product One History
- Product Two
- Product Two Detail
- Product Two History
- Collection Two
- Collection Three
What I needed was to display the page name ‘Collection One’ on the ‘Product One Detail’ and ‘Product One History’ pages (basically showing that that ‘product’ was part of that ‘collection’). Using the code to display a page’s parent page name I posted before in ‘Using page attributes in concrete5 themes‘ would not work in this situation – it would have displayed the ‘Product One’ page name.
I was able to find this code snippet in the concrete5 forums that worked perfectly:
<?php
global $c;
$nh = Loader::helper('navigation');
$cobj = $nh->getTrailToCollection($c);
?>
<?php
$rcobj = array_reverse($cobj);
if(is_object($rcobj[1]))
{
$pID = $rcobj[1]->getCollectionID();
$page = Page::getByID($pID);
$title= $page->getCollectionName();
}else{
$title= $c->getCollectionName();
}
?>
<h2><?php echo $title; ?></h2>
Source: seanom
http://www.concrete5.org/community/forums/customizing_c5/nested-pages-getcollectionname-of-first-parent
Peter Vernaglia over at Weblicating has put together a great little cheat sheet of concrete5 code snippets. There’s some very helpful stuff in there. I totally recommend checking it out and bookmarking it for future reference.
Just finishing up the design on my next theme, nicknamed “Featurist” (not sure if that will be the final name or not) and thought I’d share a little sneak peak with you again.
Featurist will be great for businesses wanting to “feature” a product or service. The theme will have a unique dropdown main nav and will include a very cool image slider (unlike anything out there for concrete5 already!).
I’m really excited about launching this one!
