Dev Training
Below are some training materials for developers. For a more detailed lesson about Web Development, see Primer for Web Developers.
Wiki Editing
- See Wikipedia's article on wikis.
- Our wiki is powered by MediaWiki, the same software that runs Wikipedia, and has many of the same features.
- Get Libre has been tweaked to restrict user access, so some wiki features have been turned off. Editing wikis requires a bit of a learning curve, so here are some helpful resources:
Creating New Pages
New wiki pages can be created by appending the desired page title to the end of the url. If a page doesn't exist, MediaWiki will give you the option of creating it. A url like https://getlibre.org/wiki/index.php?title=Sample_Page would bring you to a blank page called “Sample Page”, which you could then edit. That is, as long as you're logged in ;)
See MediaWiki's Navigation Help.
General Editing
See MediaWiki's Formatting Help. Wikipedia's Cheatsheet is also a quick reference. For help using the edit toolbar (which will do basic formatting for you), see MediaWiki's Edit Toolbar Help.
Quiz Editing
We use a plugin to generate quizzes. See Wikiversity's Simple Quiz Help for basic information on editing quizzes. More advanced users should consult Wikiversity's Quiz Help.
Command Line
Get Libre is hosted on a Debian GNU/Linux server. An understanding of the command line (terminal) is a basic skill for web development in a linux environment; the resources below will help.
Command Line Literacy
Start with the Learning Module on this site, which will give you a quick overview and link to other tutorials and activities.
Basic Shell Tutorial
Take a look at this 5-Minute Essential Shell Tutorial for Linux Mint, which is an Ubuntu derivative.
Advanced Shell Commands
If you would like to delve deeper into shell commands and shell scripting (and you should!), it's important to understand basic manipulation of text files. awk is a great command in this regard. See awk One-liners Explained and this awk Cheatsheet to get started.
PHP
A lot of (most?) dynamic websites run on PHP. If you want to understand how the Web runs, you need a basic understanding of how it works. Take a look at these resources.
Basic PHP Tutorial
This introduction to PHP is much shorter than the official documentation, and it's a good place to begin.
WordPress
Please take a gander at this PHP for WordPress Tutorial.
Intermediate PHP Editing
Although Zend's PHP tutorial is written "for the absolute beginner", it covers a *lot* of ground. Start digging into those lessons after you've taken a look at the information above.
jQuery
It's important to be comfortable with the jQuery JavaScript library, which is the de facto standard for JavaScript-powered websites.
W3C Tutorial
Live examples of JQuery in action.
How jQuery Works
For a more general conceptual overview, check out the official jQuery beginner's guide.
