Question about Developing for Concrete5

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I have been getting very interested in developing with concrete5. Developing Add-Ons, learning how the structure of c5 and blocks truly works, etc. I am even leaning towards some of the books on developing c5 that are on places like Amazon.com.

But, I am very concerned that with the for-coming of verion 5.7, that those books would be obsolete. Would the basic fundamentals for programming with c5 still stay the same going from 5.6.x to 5.7? Or, should I just wait until 5.7 is released and then learn starting from that?

 
PineCreativeLabs replied on at Permalink Reply
PineCreativeLabs
Although there will likely need to be some upgrading of most addons and themes, for the most part, 5.7 will essentially work the same way as the current version. 5.7 will have some new features and a re-imagined dashboard and user interface.

So, you should safe if you want to start learning things now, since it will be the same basic concepts.
goldhat replied on at Permalink Reply
Mike I've only looked briefly at the designs and had a quick demo tour of 5.7 but I can say a lot of changes are in the admin interface, and that while there are some new features definitely most of the underlying structure is the same or similar.

In terms of learning, definitely you would find 95% or maybe more like 98% of what you learn now applicable to 5.7. For instance in the learning process, if you're building addon's you'll learn about making packages, making blocks, overriding and extending core pages and libraries. All those things will be similar in 5.7 and future versions.

At it's core C5 is an object-oriented MVC (model view controller) system I feel in some ways that makes it more stable than many of the other CMS systems. It will probably change more than say, Code Igniter which purely a framework. But the framework aspects of C5, will stay fairly similar. I think for instance if you did some things involving the Page classes, you might expect first that Page objects will always exist, and most of the functions will always exist, there may be new functions or some tweaks to a few of the existing functions.

If you think about it on a class-by-class basis the most challenging changes that a package developer has to be concerned with are probably changes to existing functions that might produce different output than before. One would hope those sort of changes are relatively rare. I haven't looked through the code enough to know.

Learning the C5 system, even if you studied the 5.4.4.2 version from 2011 would always put you in a better position to understand future versions.
nerdymike25 replied on at Permalink Reply
Thank you both for the feedback. :)