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I am currently developing a very simple website in Orchard, which however required me to extend it both with themes, and with content types/widgets. Now this is as far as I went - Content Types and Widgets, because they were the only ones to be explained in detail in the official documentation. I've looked A LOT for answers to other questions, like How to override the default layout of a list, or How to use a custom field inside a content type, and refer to it in the code. The later is actually the motive I decided to open this thread.
How to use a custom field inside a content type, and refer to it in the code? It's fairly simple: I got a widget, which should support image attachment functionality - the author uploads an image - it gets shown to the user in a specific spot. I found the Image Field module, and I want to use that. So I figured out that I should enumerate the dependencies, but what next?
I've wasted already 2 days (14 hours each) of my productive time on stuff like this. Not reading an indexed guide, but reading tons of code, googling hundreds of blogs, in other words searching for a needle in the haystack. Do I have to understand the whole code to extend it? I want to be an implementer, not a developer for this product, and I'm sure that a lot of people also do.
What's wrong? I see people developing some pretty nice stuff on Orchard. And from what I see - they are free people - not affiliated with the project. They learned it from somewhere. I tried to learn from them, but their code has almost nothing to do with the tutorials. I feel totally lost and frustrated. Please help me beat the situation.
Is there somewhere I could find a more complete guide to Orchard CMS? To read the specs, like in MSDN, to see what the hell I am doing while writing that code from the tutorial.
Thank you.
P.S.
I know that on this site I am expected to expose the question about the concrete difficulty I am having. However I have not one, but many, and they all seem trivial. They are the kind of questions that usually get answered with a "RTFM". So I decided to take the problem from the top and ask you all if anyone of you has seen that "FM".
Orchard CMS: Up and Running - Ebook - 132 pages -may 2012
Orchard Fundamentals - Pluralsight video Training - 2h 57m -Beginner - Sep 2011
Advanced Orchard - Pluralsight video Training - 4h 12m - Advanced - Apr 2012
Orchard Documentation - Tutorial Videos (Orchard TV)
Orchard Documentation
Orchard Documentation - Getting Started With Modules - Course
Udemy Orchard Courses (currently 4 )
Workflows in Orchard CMS
Orchard CMS Theme Development Tutorial For Beginners
Some self-advertising but I think understandable: there is the Orchard Training Demo module that's a thoroughly commented module specifically aimed to walk you through the most important aspects of Orchard development.
Guide to Creating Modules From Scratch
The tutorial is well done and will definitely enlighten you what Orchard needs (development-wise) and offers.
Orchard does indeed have a rather steep learning curve. It also took me a while to figure out the basics. What I do remember is that the people in the forums are really helpful and responsive. I learned a lot from there forums. Orchard is rather new so again there are no books out yet. If you have not used their forum I encourage you to do so: orchard forum
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Working on a large and complex application, I wonder where and whether we should be storing scenarios to document how the software works.
When we discuss problems with an existing feature, it's hard to see what we have already done and it would be hard to look back with a scrum tool such as TFS. We have some tests but these are not visible to the product owner. Should we be looking to pull out some vast story / scenario list, amending / updating as we go or is this not agile.
We have no record of how the software works other than the code, some unit tests,some test cases and a few out of date user guides.
We tend to use our automated acceptance tests to document this. As we work on a user story we also develop automated tests and this is part of our Definition of Done.
We use SpecFlow for the tests and these are written as Given, When, Then scenarios that are easy to read and understand and can be shared with the product owners.
These tests add a lot of value as they are our automated regression suite so regression testing is quicker and easier, but as they are constantly kept up to date as we develop new stories they also act as documentation of how the system works.
You might find it useful to have a look at a few blogs around Specification by Example which is essentially what we are trying to do.
A few links I found useful in the past are:
http://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/specification-example
http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SpecificationByExample.html
Apart from the tests we used also a Wiki for documentation. Especially the REST API was documented with request/response examples but also other software behaviour (results from long discussions, difficult to remember stuff).
Since you want to be able to match a description of what you've done to the running software, then it sounds like you should put that in version control along with the software. Start with a docs/ directory, then add detail as you need it. I do this frequently, and it just works. If you want to make this web-servable, then set up a web server somewhere to check out the docs every so often and point the document root at the working copy docs/ directory.
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I am intrested in learning about Music Visualization.
(eg: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_visualization )
Does anyone have any books to recommend on the subject?
(I know its not a technical question, but it seems like a good place to ask)
Many thanks
You're in luck--it's a great time to get involved in the medium. Lots of new open source multimedia platforms are available now, with great communities forming around them--making it much easy to get something up and running.
I'm not aware of any books specifically on audio visualisation, but I think you'd be well served by reading more general material on:
computer graphics in general
graphic design (color, form, etc)
data visualisation
any of the great new open source multimedia platforms
If you're writing a visualization plugin for a media player, the problem can usually be treated as mapping FFT data and time to pixel space. You get the time and FFT data nearly for free, so the remainder of the problem is graphics programming, visual design, musical sensitivity and imagination. The way you combine these will ideally be your own.
You can expect to find lots of great information, tools, examples and communities surrounding any of the modern open source multimedia platforms:
processing.org -- a Java based platform which makes it really easy to get your works (called "sketches") up and running, with plenty of examples. You could plug in a library like minim to get the audio FFT parts for free
openFrameworks and libcinder -- C++ based platforms. If you want to write plugins for a media player like iTunes, you may need to use a language like C++. If you already know (or want to learn) C++, both are good choices.
I'd recommend jumping straight in with a platform like processing.org, together with a library like minim, play with the bundled examples, and build your knowledge from there.
There are quite a few books on processing if that suits your learning style.
If you want to stay current, blogs like createdigitalmotion are a great resource.
Also check out artists like flight4040 and Memo Akten who are using these frameworks.
Hope that helps.
Check this fantastic blog post:
http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2011/visualizing-music/
There is also some great material on this book:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0060926716/ref=aw_d_detail?pd=1
The author also has a website with some examples.
http://www.constructingtheuniverse.com/Amen%20Break%20and%20GR.html
Happy visualizing
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There's not a lot to add to the subject really.
I am after a free task board/ burndown reporting tool for Windows.
If you're willing to host your tool,
TargetProcess
(http://www.targetprocess.com/)
XPlanner(http://xplanner.codehaus.org/)
If not,
Pivotal Tracker (http://www.pivotaltracker.com/)
ScrumWorks (http://danube.com/scrumworks/basic)
All are either free or have a free version.
Depending on your real needs, solutions range from :
hand-written cards complemented with a manually drawn burndown chart as big visible chart as recommend by Ilja
spreadsheet-based list with automatic burndown graph generation (example)
online tools such as scrumy, scrumpad and skinnyboard
local application with web access
free ScrumWorks basic, Icescrum2
or commercial ScrumWorks Pro ProjectCards, or, as Eliza recommended, TargetProcess
Remember however the Agile manifesto is recommending to favor "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools".
I'd recommend starting small, perhaps with a spreadsheet if you insist on automatic burndown charting.
Check out SeeNowDo at www.seenowdo.com
It's a free online taskboard for distributed Agile teams. It's pretty cool and provides convenient features like 'always-on' and 'instant-sync' capability. It also has some cool ways of managing the taskboard layout once you have alot of tasks on it. Best of all, it's completely free.
Apparently I got to disclose I built this product
You might want to try: http://www.burndown-charts.com
It's a free webapp for managing burndown charts. You create a team and a sprint and you are ready to go. Enter your tasks once they are done. Perfect for when you still want to keep a board and/or post-its. You can add teammates to your team if you need.
You're not going to spend an hour figuring out how to use it.
That is exactly what Scrumy.com is. It is a whiteboard with sticky notes. The pro version has a burndown.
Try Mingle. It is free for upto 5 users.
Open Source app: http://taskboard.cognifide.com/
Fast, tidy tool :)
EDIT
Ok, we are working on something that does just what you asked and way more:
Actionable metrics
Powerful analytics
All this on a slick Dashboard
It's meant to eliminate the use of excel sheets to build your own reports by hand.
It's a far better solution and it is in beta right now.
Sign up and participate in the beta to make sure your features are well covered!
http://www.in-sight.io
Well, without knowing more about your situation, I have to highly recommend a wall of index cards and a handdrawn chart on flip chart paper. Works much better than any software in the standard situation.
If you really have to use software, there is none that I could recommend unreservedly, let alone a free one. You might want to keep in mind that some of the commercial ones are free for open source or academic projects, too. Which one's right for you will depend, besides other things, on how much you want it to define your process.
You might consider creating your own solution using a spreadsheet.
That way you get low overhead on data entry and as much reporting capabilities as you want, without having an external tool define your process.
Especially on single-person projects (as this appears to be from the comment on Ilja Preuß's answer), I find that a simple spreadsheet actually works better for me.
I keep all my tasks in one workbook, and the formulas that pull out interesting data and calculations in a separate workbook.
I made a basic plugin that can be inserted in google wave and be used as a taskboard. More details in http://agilebooknote.blogspot.com/2009/11/taskboardy-available.html.
Cheers,
-fede
I'm a fan of google docs because of the simplicity and also because I can give access to my team so that they can update their tasks on a daily basis. The template I use and a tutorial on how to use it is available at
Burn Down Chart Tutorial: Simple Agile Project Tracking
I know this is old thread, but I came across this question looking for something similar. I signed up for AgileZen (http://www.agilezen.com/) and it's actually quite good.
I wanted something free that my wife and I could use for personal/home stuff. It's free if you're willing to have only one project (I call it "Home") and one other collaborator (my wife). It's a pretty good solution for us.
I promise I have no affiliation with them! Except that I now use their product.
If your project is open source, non-profit or a classroom you can get free access to Atlassians' JIRA + Greenhopper (and other tools) for agile project management. Otherwise small teams can get access for a nominal fee.
see http://www.atlassian.com/software/greenhopper/overview and http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/overview.
See http://www.atlassian.com/software/views/open-source-license-request if your an open source project.
http://www.atlassian.com/software/views/community-license-request if you are a non-profit
and
http://www.atlassian.com/survey/classroom-license-request if your a classroom.
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In a related question, I asked about Web Development. I came across something called OpenLaszlo yesterday and thought it looked interesting for doing some website development. The site has a bunch of good information on it and they've got some nice tutorials and such, but being a total novice (as far as web development goes), I'm wondering whether anyone here would recommend this. As I stated in my other question, this is a new world for me and there are a lot of directions I could go. Can you compare/contrast this and other web development you've done? Obviously, this is somewhat subjective, but I haven't heard much about it on SO and I'm hoping to get some opinions on this.
I worked on a website for about a year in which the entire UI was developed in Laszlo. I've also developed AJAX applications using JS frameworks such as JQuery, Prototype and Scriptaculous.
In my experience, the total effort required is considerably less when using Laszlo, and the class-based object model helps to keep your code better organised than when using JS frameworks. My only complaints about Laszlo were that:
It "breaks the browser" in terms of support for the back/forward/refresh buttons. This problem also exists with AJAX, but most JS libraries seem to have found a workaround.
No support for internationalization, though none of the JS libraries are any better in my experience
Relatively small user base/community compared to competitors such as GWT, JQuery, etc.
All in all, I thought OpenLaszlo was a pretty good solution for creating rich web-based user interfaces, and has a number of very novel features, e.g. ability to deploy on multiple runtimes (Flash, DHTML, etc.) without requiring any code changes.
Also, I should mention that I haven't used it for almost a year, so it's likely that some progress has been made in recent times on the issues I mentioned above.
Update
5 years since I posted this answer, things have changed considerably. In case anyone is in any doubt, don't use Laszlo, the project is completely moribund.
I used openLaszlo to develop a few blog widgets for some friends of mine (about a year ago) and it was easy enough to get something basic working and it looked OK. But if I had to do it again, I would probably use FLEX I think you can make a more polished looking application in a lot less time using Flex than with Laszlo
You definitely can write a flash app quickly with OpenLaszlo. There are a lot of similarities to developing for Silverlight.
One OpenLaszlo lameness is that it uses a lame variation of javascript similar to ActionScript. Takes a little getting used to, if you are used to the latest features.
Also, the final flash file that you end up with is very large (file size) compared to what you can do with other tools.
One benefit of OpenLaszlo is the possibility of DHTML output. But for me the mix of XML and JavaScript in the same source file was somewhat confusing.
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I'm supposed to learn how to use LabVIEW for my new job, and I'm wondering if anybody can recommend some good books or reference/tutorial web sites.
I'm a senior developer with lots of Java/C#/C++ experience.
I realize that this question is perhaps more vague than is intended on stack overflow, so how about this? Please answer with one book or web site and a brief description. Then people can vote up their favourites.
It will take some training and some time to learn the style needed to develop maintainable code.
Coming from Java/C#/C++, you probably have a good idea of good software architecture. Now you just need to learn the peculiarities of LabView and the common pitfalls.
For the basics, National Instruments offers training courses. See if your new employer can send you to a Basics I/II class to get your feet wet. They offer some online classes as well. Following classes, you can sign up to take tests for certification.
Get an evaluation copy of Labview from National Instruments; they have a well maintained help file that you can dive right into, with example code included. Look at "Getting Started" and "LabVIEW Environment". You should be able to jump right in and become familiar with the dev environment pretty quickly.
LabVIEW, being graphical is nice, but don't throw out your best practices from an application design point of view. It is common to end up with code looking like rainbow sphaghetti, or code that stretches several screens wide. Use subvi's and keep each vi with a specific purpose and function.
The official NI support forums and knowledgebase are probably the best resources out there at the moment.
Unofficial sites like Tutorials in G have a subset of the information found on the official site and documentation, but still may be useful for cross reference if you get stuck.
Edit: Basics I/II are designed to be accessible to users without prior software development experience. Depending on how you feel after using the evaluation version, you may be able to move directly into Intermediate I/II. NI has the course outlines available on their website as well, so you know what you're going to cover in each.
LabVIEW for Everyone is recently revised and quite comprehensive. Other than the free stuff available on the Web, this is probably the best place to start learning the language.
The LabVIEW Style Guide is a great book on how to organize and arrange your code and files for maximum benefit.
Object oriented programming is a recent addition to LabVIEW. The LVOOP white paper explains much about how it works and why the way it is the way it is.
It's a bit out of date, but LabVIEW Advanced Programming Techniques by Bitter, Mohiuddin and Nawrocki is still full of useful stuff.
The National Instruments forums are a great place to go for basic help. The LabVIEW Advanced Virtual Architects (LAVA) is the community forum for advanced topics.
Tutorials in G, also check out the webring.
-Adam
The official NI support page and support forums are hard to beat.
It really helps having a guru around for LabVIEW.
'Arc the daft' pretty much nailed exactly what one should try to do to learn LabVIEW. However, I would not skip Basic's I and II. The classes do teach basic programming concepts and are geared to non-programmers, however they do cover the IDE extensively. The LabVIEW IDE is strange coming from a text based language and spending the time in the class learning it with an instructor can really accelerate your learning.
I would skip Intermediate 1 if you are a seasoned developer. Intermediate 1 tries to teach software engineering practices in the span of a three day course. If you are studying to get your CLD you need to know the course and the terminology for the exam, otherwise I wouldn't spend my time or capital in the course.
Subscribe to the Info-LabVIEW mailing list. It's got a lot quieter in recent times as the NI and LAVA forums have grown in popularity, but it's still read by some very experienced and helpful people, including people at NI, and if you can't find what you need elsewhere then a good question will usually get a good answer.
The NI style guide, as already mentioned, is a good reference - re-read it as you learn about more of the things it covers, it contains some densely packed good advice.
Personal top tips: look at the supplied example code (although it's not necessarily perfect); learn to use queues and notifiers as soon as possible; don't dive in to using event structures and control references until you've figured out what you can and can't do without them; and start small and simple - you should find it easy to reuse this code later on by repackaging it into subVI's as the scope of your ambitions increases. And have fun!
For me the best way to learn LabVIEW was by analyzing the in-build examples. The best forums are NI Developer Zone Community and LAVA Forums
LabVIEW is really easy to work with but the tricky bit is to know how to design your application so that it will not becaome a spaghetti. Once you get the basics (e.g. LabVIEW Introduction Course) learn how to use design patterns, events, queues, typedefs and references. Use modular architecture, avoid big structures, try 'writing' your code in small window.
It is also important to know the differences between LabVIEW versions (full/pro, and ver 7.1.1, 8.2, 8.5, 8.6, 2009), how to use version control system with the vi's (binary files), and how to keep your files in project so that you can easily reuse any code and be "DRY" (don't repeat yourself), how to build executable and what LabVIEW RunTime Engine it needs (for customers), what is DAQmx and how to use it, what are VISA drivers and which version is correct for you settings, how to use Measurements & Automation program..
When I started with LabVIEW a few years ago I was given a link to the LabVIEW Graphical Programming Course. It covers the basics and having a sound knowledge of other programming languages I think helped me pick things up quickly.
I would start with the LabVIEW wiki.
Specifically, LabVIEW Tutorial. There are lots of online references and links to LabVIEW reference books. Welcome to the world of LabVIEW!
I would suggest you start with LabVIEW for Everyone. Its a good book which covers the basics of LabVIEW well.