Important! This page contains archived/old information and is not to be considered current.
Basic Rock Concepts
Nearly everything you see in Rock is developed as something
we call a "block". A block can live on one or more
pages. Behind the scenes blocks communicate with the database,
the REST API, and sometimes the page or other blocks on the page.
The details of fetching and saving data is detailed
in the developer guides.
Designers will likely focus on the UX and UI markup of blocks while
developers will focus on the functionality, logic and data the blocks
handle.
In addition to blocks and pages there are things we call "Sites"
and "Layouts" in Rock. They control the overall look and themeing of the
websites you create.
Other Core Technologies
Like most modern systems, Rock stands on the shoulders of giants to get things
done. We've baked several technologies into Rock so make your life
easier.
We rely heavily on the CSS and markup standards of
Bootstrap 3, the scalable vector
icons of Font Awesome 5, and
obviously the power of jQuery for
rich UI and DOM manipulation, so you will want a strong understanding of these
before you start trying to design, layout or create markup in Rock.
Environment Setup
We took cost into consideration when we were deciding which platform to
develop Rock on. With the free Express editions of Microsoft's Visual Studio
and SQL Server, developing for Rock does not have to cost you anything.
Developers should use either their Visual Studio 2013
or the free Visual Studio 2013 Express for Web.
You'll also need either the Express (free) or Standard edition of
Microsoft SQL Server 2014 or newer.
Next you should use the Rockit (/'rɑːkɪt/)
to create a custom Rock SDK just for you. There we'll create a zip file with a sample
project specific to your organization/domain so you'll have a very clear pattern to follow
for all your future development.
Designers that only want to use their favorite image and HTML editing tools
are free to do so, but at some point they may want to see the efforts of their
labor inside a working Rock installation. So we encourage them to work with
a developer to use a Rock test system or take the plunge to
set up their own.