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Section covered in this article: Web site templates.

In each CoreDogs Experience article, my goal is twofold: (1) to look in-depth at a single feature of the site or its content (this will likely be analysis or commentary a CoreDogs feature that is present in multiple places as opposed to a single section) and (2) to take a look at what went on in a given section of the course.

CoreDogs Feature: The Dogs

Another recurring theme within CoreDogs is the presence of some dog characters.  Some of the commonly appearing ones are named “CC”, “Renata”, and “Kieran”.  They are employed as characters who contribute a sort of Socratic debate method that aim to answer common questions.  For example, after a given amount of explanatory/instructional content either CC or Renata will make a comment like “Hey wait a minute, this seems awfully complex.  Is it worth the effort?”, and then the Kieran character will affirm their question by saying something like “Good point.  Let’s talk about that a bit”.  After this hypothetical dialogue, the course then gives a detailed answer to the dog’s questions.  The screen shot to right is placed near the end of Web site templates section.  The conversation that follows is very helpful in making an argument for the added productivity that the seemingly complex PHP dynamic web template creates.  It serves as a great summation of the usefulness that should be grasped from this section.

This method aims to answer questions that students would commonly ask at a given point in the lesson.  I love this.  (I was immediately reminded of the way the Apostle Paul lists hypothetical questions and then answers them for readers of his letter to the Romans)  As a student, thinking that I could read detailed explanations to my questions would greatly decrease any worry that I might have about taking an online course.  In my opinion, it would be great to see this used in all of the text books that I’m required to use at school.

Course Content So Far

The Web site Templates section focuses on the PHP require command as well as variables to create a dynamic template for a website.  The advantages of this sort of template come from being able to edit the header or footer of a website in one spot, and have the changes be immediate on every page of the site.  You could almost call this sort of template a content management system.

This section felt quite a bit longer and more exercise laden than the previous sections, but this is understandable because it is introducing the actual use of PHP for the first time in the ServerCore book.  To get the student familiar with PHP, a combination of near-transfer and far-transfer exercises are used.  While I was going through these exercises, one question kept popping up in my mind:

Earlier in the ServerCore book, I was instructed to set up a development server on my PC using XAMMP.  This was very easy to set up and has worked seamlessly so far.  BUT, after completing each exercise, the user is instructed to submit the URL of the completed exercise.  This is so the instructor can check my work and make comments on it if necessary.  The problem is that if I submit the “localhost” URL from XAMMP, the instructor won’t be able to access my work.  This shouldn’t surprise anyone, but I think it should be clarified that to submit an exercise, it needs to be first uploaded to an actual web server.[1]  In fact, differentiating between the student’s Development and Production server could be useful in that it will familiarize students with this real-world concept that may be used in the workplace.  A comment at the end of an exercise like “Upload the completed exercise to your production server and submit the URL” should be enough once this concept is explained.

Another minor snafu related to the use of XAMMP was that in the Show IP Addresses exercise, IP addresses were displayed as “::1”.  This was mentioned by another student in the discussion section of the exercise (which proved helpful in this case).  If the use of XAMMP is encouraged throughout ServerCore, it may help to mention this in the main body of the content as well.

One more XAMMP related remark was that in the Web server time exercise, the time was displayed was not the same time as my PC’s clock.  This doesn’t bother me much, but I can imagine some students getting frustrated by this (thinking they did something wrong).

The quality of the instructional content is still top-notch, as mentioned in my previous article.  Though, something to be careful about is the use of the HTML <code> tag when referring to file names that are in examples or diagrams.  In the image below (taken from the Complete template system page) I thought there was a CSS file named “library.dogsite.css” being referred to.  This is a tiny quibble but may be worth keeping an eye on.

All in all, this section was rewarding especially because I’m already able to use PHP to create a sort of dynamic web site template.  Many of the images and diagrams work very well and are great at visualizing what is being explained.  I particularly liked this color-coded one.  See the table below for a summary of my thoughts on this section.