Book Image

Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development

By : James Kennard
Book Image

Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development

By: James Kennard

Overview of this book

<p><br />Joomla! is the world's hottest open-source content management system, and the winner of the 2006 Open Source CMS Prize. Out of the box, Joomla! does a great job of managing the content needed to make your website sing. But for many people, the true power of Joomla! lies in its application framework that makes it possible for thousands of developers around the world to create powerful add-ons and extensions. Many companies or organizations have requirements that go beyond what is available in the basic Joomla! package or in a freely available extension. Thankfully, Joomla! offers a powerful application framework that makes it easy for developers to create sophisticated add-ons that extend the power of Joomla! into virtually unlimited directions.<br /><br />If you use PHP programming to extend or customize Joomla!, this book is essential reading. If you feel that you've mastered the basics of creating Joomla! extensions, then this book will take you to the next level. Packed with expert advice on all aspects of development with Joomla!, you will learn about best-practice design and coding for Joomla! components, modules, plugins and other extensions. <br /><br />You will also learn about customizing the page output, using JavaScript effects, making use of Web Services from within Joomla! and ensuring that your code is secure and error-free.<br /><br />A unique and comprehensive reference to the main areas of interest within the Joomla! framework is also included in the book.</p> <p><a href="http://www.packtpub.com/article/joomla-one-point-five-extension-framework-table-of-contents"><br /></a></p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Appendix

Summary


Components are undoubtedly the most complex extensions, and, as a result, the hardest to implement. Before jumping in head first, it can be a good idea to examine existing components to see how they are constructed. The Web Links component is used as an example because it demonstrates many of the common aspects of a component and does so with a relatively simple and easy-to-understand data structure.

The MVC pattern consists of three parts, the model, view, and controller. Getting to grips with how these interact with one another is fundamental to creating well-formed components.

We investigated the use of the different document formats: feed, HTML, PDF, and RAW. Enabling a component to render the same data in several formats requires very little effort and can make a component far more successful.

Understanding how menu items override the component configuration is imperative when dealing with the component configuration. Administrators also sometimes misunderstand the approach; we...