Documentation to creating a new theme not working for me,

Using Concrete / Help
1

I am trying to learn concrete CMS version 9.1.1 from the ground up beginning with building a theme. I’m at “Create the empty package code”. After following all the instructions on that page, it says to “proceed to Dashboard > Extend Concrete > Add Functionality” and it shows an image of that page with the package waiting to be installed. When I go to that page mine shows that the package is broken and can’t be installed. I have been over the instructions over and over again and can’t find anything wrong. I am thinking that because the instructions are ambiguous about what the root of the website is there might be a problem where I started construction of the package. Perhaps it might be a problem with the name space declarations. My website root is /var/www/html/woodworkers_alliance/ and I started building the test package at woodworkers_alliance/packages/dreamrs/.

2

A common issue to look out for is plurals. In many cases the directory name is a plural, but namespace is not. But not in all cases. It is very easy to go wrong without realising it.

3

Thanks so much for responding to my post. Now that I have had a night’s sleep to unmuddle my head, it’s apparent that the issue is not namespace or directory architecture. To make sure that I don’t make any mistakes in entry, I created the controller.php entirely with cut 'n paste from the tutorial itself. The string of data that is output on the page is all the text that is in this controller and not any other that it might have found in concrete’s hierarchy.

When I get this issue resolved, would you be willing to answer a few questions about namespace and how it relates to concrete CMS?

4

I found it. Why are all the mistakes we eventually find turn out to be so dumb that it makes us cry. I missed the <?php at the beginning of the file. It’s incredible that concrete found it as an object without the php declaration. It was a separate line that is grayed out so I didn’t pick it up. In my editor there was no contextual highlighting on the text. That was my hint that wasn’t immediately recognized.

6

Ha, I may or may not have brought down a production site adding accidentally adding white space before the opening PHP tag a while ago… :wink: I know that pain all too well.