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With my background as a musician and writer, and with my current job as an editor, programming skills have never been a high priority. Sure, it would be neat to learn sometime, just not today. This, of course, conflicts with my alter ego as a web site hobbyist, where knowing how to code can be very useful.
Fortunately for me, I found Mambo in Dec. of 2003, because it allowed me to put together dynamic and interesting web sites with little or no programming knowledge.
However, at some point you are bound to find something that isn’t included with MOS and hasn’t been developed as a third-party add-on. Then, you are going to need to either make it yourself, or get somebody else to do it.
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For me, this need arose when I was building a web site for my sister. Throughout the entire process, she was filled with wouldn’t it be neat’s.
“Wouldn’t it be neat if there was a way for people to refer their friends to my site.” She would say.
I would say, “Ok! That is called ‘Recommend.’ I’ll download it right now and install it.”
After a more than a few rounds of similar discussions, we got to one where mamboportal.com wasn’t the answer:
“Wouldn’t it be neat if we could display a randomly rotating entry from the guest book on the front page?” She asked.
To which my response was, “sure, just give me some time to learn how to do it.” I figured it would be a long time before I would be able to produce such a module, and let her know so.
But, two days later, I had a module for her called Random Guest.
Did I go out and learn all of PHP in those two days, and then make a module?
No. Instead, I used existing, similar modules, as a model to work from.
I downloaded two modules as examples to start from. Guestbook Tracker, which displays the name of the last person to sign the guest book, and AkoGallery Items, which displays random items from AkoGallery.
I was able to essentially mix these two modules together, using the bit of SQL from AkoGallery Items to pull one random entry from the guestbook, and examining Guestbook Tracker for how to get what I needed from the AkoBook table of the database.
In the end I wound up with around 17 lines of code (not counting comments) that worked like a charm, and made my sister a very happy camper.
I am now more determined than ever to learn more about PHP, MySQL and Mambo, and make more complicated scripts. Again, I plan to just jump right in and use good examples as a learning tool. |
Written by Guest on 2004-05-24 18:42:00
 | Written by Guest on 2004-06-21 13:11:00
 In conclusion, how can I actually build a module?
But it is great to hear that you managed to do that. I think I would give it a shot someday.  | Written by Guest on 2004-07-25 11:22:05
Don't ya wanna give us that module? |
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