A few thoughts and wishes

Firstly, I have to give kudos to Ellislab, for creating codeigniter, releasing it and supporting it. Anyone who has developed any software would know that developing a framework and maintaining it is a mammoth task. Secondly, expressionengine, it’s a good product. I think it does what it wants to do very well.

I do have one gripe though. I find the documentation to be lacking. Being a developer, I realise that documentation is what you least like doing, but what most needs doing. That said, EE is a paid for product and yet it’s documentation falls short of free offerings like djangoproject. Have a look at their documentation over here: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.2

I’ve just begun developing my first module. Got my own template engine setup, everything fine. First form created and displayed, happiness!

Then the clouds appeared. I couldn’t submit the form. Reason being I was not sending an XID.

What happens when you submit a form without an XID is… you get redirected to the CP homepage. No warning message, no error message. I tried looking through the code to find what was happening but this proved too complicated. Eventually I resigned myself to installing xdebug and the vim plugin. After stepping through everything eventually I found the line with the redirect. Doh!

I obviously missed the talk about the XID in the module overview or tutorial. Wrong. It’s not mentioned. It’s spoken about in the security section, but not anywhere else.

I assume that most module addons would use at least one form. Something that would be populated and managed from the control panel, that is not storing data in channels etc. Based on that assumption I would assume that there would be some visible documentation on the subject, yet it is sorely lacking.

I really think EE could use some good documentation. It would make mine and everyone else’s life much easier. I really hope to see some in the near future.