Digital Butter

Evo FTW!

Coffee, Kettle chips, and Evelyn Lin (NSFW). Those are just a few of the inside jokes that make the office so incredibly fun (and I’m not just being paid to say that!). All jokes and fun aside, learning MODx has been an incredible experience.

I remember back in January, when I first joined the team, I was still unaware of any CMSes. I had learned to code HTML and CSS, and then tried to read up on bits and pieces of PHP. I’m a good learner, but I’ve never had someone who’s had the patience of personally teaching me how to do it.

And then I built my first MODx site on Evolution. Instantly, I understood the concept. What was there not to get? That should be the pagetitle? Replace it with [*pagetitle*]! You need to use another field in there? Replace it! Essentially, it was a search and replace game. Just replace everything that needed to be dynamic, and you had your original website again. Converting frontend code to a CMS was just that easy. With that, I fell in love.

This past weekend, someone made a prop bet with me. We had received a project with a client who’s from a design firm. They had already provided a “website” (I use that term loosely, because if you had seen the source code, you would’ve cried out in horror too). So the prop bet was this: build a website in a workday, and I would get a packet of Kettle chips (salt+pepper is absolutely money. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise). Eventually, I managed to get the deal to doing it on a weekend, while getting 2 personal days in return. We shook.

So with the difficulty level only ever rising to finding hex color codes, I pretty much re-frontend coded the site, while at the same time, adding in placeholders. I woke up at 4pm. Made myself some pasta. Sat down at 5pm, and started coding. No distractions, no meetings, just a perfect work environment. I finished the whole thing by midnight.

It was amazingly fun. Beating the deadline. Being able to consolidate my knowledge of MODx without having to look up anything in the documentation. I was already well-versed, knew exactly where to start, and what my direction was. I built a website on my very own, without any questions asked. (I even had time to insert all the content too.)

Granted, it’s taken me 5 months to get to this stage, with many people supporting me along the way, being patient with me, teaching me all that I needed to know. I’m a naturally curious person, and it’s helped me learn so much. I know we’ve been getting a lot of rep for building out Revo sites, but in all honesty, the simplicity of Evo gets so much done. (Earlier today, James accidentally wrote out [[+session.lang]] on an Evo site, and I had to remind him that he was back in Evo.)

- Eve Lin

PS - Some day I’ll gush over my love for keyboard shortcuts, Reddit, Mac apps, multi-finger swipes, bacon, funny comments in source code, our inappropriate jokes, web_assets, and my hatred for screencasts.