I felt like I made great progress in understanding xenforo. What I did was read
this tutorial by
@Fuhrmann, then downloaded and installed
@Kier's
ajax tutorial add-on, analysed the add-on files then watched his video for the add-on. To make sure I had the basic concepts, I stole all of the add-on code from the tutorial and used it to successfully create my own add-on. Doing that helped me understand the class names and file structure better.
I still have much to learn, but I believe I now have a good basic understanding of the Xenforo MVC paradigm.
At the moment there are two things that elude my understanding, and hope that someone will help give me some greater insight.
1) I still can't figure out the purpose of using Xen tags in my templates. I can't figure out if it's some sort of interface between Html and PHP or ??? In my controller I use PHP to create some variables, but in my template I have to use Xen tags to access the contents of those variables. Why is that, I wonder??? It's a mystery to me.
2) In
@Kier's add-on, he creates and uses a javascript file that is physically located in the "JS" sub-directory. Why does he do this and for that matter why is the JS directory even there for?? I can render javascript directly in my template, so why would I include my javascript from a file in the "JS" sub-directory?? Is it for performance, is it a coding style, or is it because it supports javascript functions that can't be done within a template?? This is also a mystery to me.
I hope someone out there can help enlighten me.