Getting started

What you need before you write code against Hubzero: a hub to develop against, a way to reach its files and its database, and a sense of what changed in the framework you are reading.

The CMS is PHP, and it does not run standalone. You develop against a working hub, replacing its CMS directory with a checkout of hubzero/hubzero-cms. Everything under core/ is the platform; everything under app/ is that hub's own state and is not in the repository.

What you should know

The requirements are modest: PHP, and a text editor. Working knowledge of the following makes the rest of this book easier:

• HTML and CSS
• JavaScript. The CMS ships jQuery 3.3.1 in core/assets/js/jquery.js and most of its own scripts are written against it.
• XML, which every extension manifest and configuration file is written in
• The model-view-controller pattern, which components and the admin interface follow
• Object-oriented PHP. The framework is namespaced under Hubzero\ and autoloaded by Composer.

The platform targets PHP 8.2; core/composer.json pins the platform to 8.2.30 and the lint workflow runs on 8.3.

In this section

• Release notes — where release notes live, and the one historic change that still shapes the code you read.
• Accessing files — reaching a hub's files on the server, and reading and writing files from code.
• Direct database access — the hub's credentials, the shell, and the #__ table prefix.
• Upgrade guide — the legacy class names an older extension uses and what replaced them.
• Browser support — what the code actually targets, which is less than you might expect.
• Development environment — getting a hub to develop against, and what this repository does and does not provide.

Next

Foundation covers how a request is served and the names an extension uses constantly. Contributing covers sending a change back.