The first MidCOM component modification

Fri 15th October 2004 10:11 EEST

The art of component writing is still quite a mystery. MidCOM is already so complex that it's easy to end up re-inventing the wheel. While most parts of MidCOM are well documented, in the developer sense, it's still quite hard for a PHP codemonkey, like me, to get up there and modify the components.

So, I used one full office day to write a quite simple modification to the net.nemein.organizations component. The Nemein's up-and-coming Web site required a case study carousel and I figured that should be something better served by the component than external Midgard/PHP code.

After a day's work I had my randomizer working pretty well and I think I got a pretty good idea of the component writing too. Although this time it was easy to follow the guidelines of the existing code.

For those wanting to write some components to MidCOM, I'd recommend the following Web pages:

• Nico Kaiser's component template (there's some other useful stuff too, though a bit outdated already)
  
• MidCOM documentation
• Source code from other components, especially de.linkm.newsticker and de.linkm.taviewer
• #midgard IRC channel on irc.midgard-project.org, look for torben and bergie