The developer studio in Hamburg is located nicely. Directly located at the district of Altona, close-by the Autobahn 7, it is well reachable from my village Harsefeld. My bell rings at 07:00 am every morning and when i'm out the house at 08:00 am, i reach the destination half an hour early. It wasn't very difficult so far to find a parking lot. In contrary to my assumption there is always a parking lot to find somewhere. Kuborgh was founded a few years ago (i don't know the exact details) by 2 graduates of the FH Wedel (university for applied sciences). One of the founders is Till Kubelke, from whom a part of the name is derived. The other developer team is placed at Cologne, where Till's partner is to find. The name i don't know, but it ends pretty defenitely with "borgh" ;). Till is often occupied with telephone conferences, he surely is also in contact with the guys at Cologne.

My task at the moment is to get to know the redspark system. The system is written in object oriented PHP. It is based on the zend framework. Good thing i never heard a word about the zend framework ;). I hope to break into the stuff in time. The training is just for a week to test out my abilities. After all, i am relatively new to this stuff and have to get to know the cms. The redspark system is built in a modular way: in it's center, there is the app (application). The redspark system itself is also an app. If you want your own website, you first need an app which you can aquire through a cloning process (essentially create a basic application with some basic configuration). From there, you can built a template for the site, that's where HTML and CSS comes in. An app must have a template for it to work. You can also clone a template. Through this process, all relevant data that the template needs, is created. Then you can copy the HTML and CSS from the design draft (the html file you received from the designer or that you designed yourself) into the template. In addition, several markers for so called inline actions like the content, menu, the custom menu (meant to be a second or third menu on the page), breadcrumbs and several others have to be placed in the template. The redspark system later replaces those markers with the actual content, the menu, the breadcrumbs etc.

At the moment, i am as far as having cloned my own app and template. Till has given me a html draft with css. I inserted the markup into the corresponding template file. There is a seperate file for the css in the template. After that, the markers have to be placed in the template. Subsequently the config file has to be edited in order to configure which markers will be filled by which modules. After having done that, you can look at your brandnew basic redspark site, a first achievement. The menu is still a bit "tricky", it is created with an additional menu template in which the smarty templating engine is used. In there, all layers of the menu are processed recursively. You can assert the HTML to CSS classes, to later style the menu at will and creativity.

Today i worked on a tutorial for the so called inline actions. Inline actions are all things that you can stuff into your template, f.e. the before-mentioned menu, the custom menu, meta keywords, breadcrumbs and several others. Because, until now, i only know the menu and the custom menu (is being used as a second menu for the site), i'm curious about the others. I'm doing the tutorial in HTML and therefore can allocate it to other developers.

The working climate at Kuborgh is nice. It is a quite familial athmosphere, because there are only 4 people in the bureau including me. I sit on one table with Hannes and Ben, two developers at Kuborgh. Hannes and ben are quite occupied with different matters. At the moment, they are working on some kind of facebook connection, that's what i hear. I'm trying to squeeze in a question in every free second.At the moment, the situation is relatively fine. Unfortunately, i don't quite understand the whole underlying concept of the redspark system. This model-view-controller concept still gives me a headache.

There is a coffee machine with which you can make yourself, naturally, a nice coffee. Into the cups, there is even the Kuborgh logo engraved. You can also get yourself a sweet at the snack bar, it only costs 30 cents a treat. There are treats like snickers, maers or milchschnitte. But actually, i didn't take anything so far. We also went to lunch together, right around the corner at the asian cuisine. There, you can get yourself nice fried noodles or fried chicken, a big meal costs about 4 Euro 20 cents, no regrets.

Well, i'm curious about how the week will turn out. Maybe i'll prolong the training. Let's see how the week will turn out.