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Rock Developer Documentation

Where Do I Start?

I wish you didn't have to read this wiki, but the truth is Rock is extremely functional and has tons of things you should be aware of before you start developing. To make your life easier and help you get started we've attempted to organize the main development sections into three levels:

• Rock Development 101 - overly simple examples to help you understand some basics
• Rock Development 202 - essential details you'll need to create real, meaningful Rock functionality (you really should read through each page in this section if you want to get on track.)
• Rock Development 303 - deep details you'll need to know if you need to maximize your use of Rock

So read through the About Rock section and then down through to the Rock Development 202 section. You can then take a break and go develop something. When you're ready you can come back and read the last sections.

In the spirit of Rock, this documentation is community driven. You're encouraged to get involved by contributing to the documentation (see Rock Wiki Guidelines). Go ahead and edit existing pages as needed, but please add your new, proposed topics to the proposed topics page and someone from the team will review and put them into the table of contents.

Table of Contents

About Rock

• Basic Rock Concepts
• Rock Requirements
• Installing Rock ChMS
• Adding Pages and Blocks

Rock Development 101 - Getting Started

• Building Your First Custom Block
• Creating a Website Theme
• Creating a Check-in Theme

Rock Development 202 - Additional Essentials

• Blocks
• UI Toolkit
• Entities (General)
• Entities (Specific)
• Exception Handling
• UI Guidelines
• Before you go too much farther - Naming Conventions
• Coding Standards

Rock Development 303 - Advanced Stuff

• Workflow
• Performance Related Considerations
• Custom Field Attributes and FieldTypes
• Extension Methods
• Context Aware Blocks
• Rock Jobs
• Rock Security
• Check-In System

Packaging Plugins & Themes

How to manually package your Rock Themes.

Internal Overview for Rock Core Developers

• Solution Structure
• Rock Project
• RockWeb Project
• The Other Projects
• System GUIDs
• Git Branching Strategy
• Writing & Running Unit Tests
• Other Coding Suggestions
• Creating Rock Migrations
• Exporting and Packaging

Rock Administration

This section will inevitably be moved somewhere else, but in the mean time, here are some things that we've captured and don't want to loose.

Reference

A few things that are not covered in the documentation are here in the reference section.