Book Image

Joomla! 1.5x Customization: Make Your Site Adapt to Your Needs

Book Image

Joomla! 1.5x Customization: Make Your Site Adapt to Your Needs

Overview of this book

Setting up a basic Joomla! Web site is easy; what comes next is hard and expensive ñ making the site do exactly what and look exactly how you want. With this book in hand, it is easy to adapt your site to bring your vision fully to life. This book will help you to separate your site from the crowd of other Joomla! sites without having to invest in developers. It will guide you through how to customize different parts and aspects of your site and will also show you how to turn your site into a profitable business via these customizations. You will be able to build a successful, professional web site that will adapt to all your business needs. You will be taken beyond the basics of Joomla!, and given an insight into the techniques and tools used by the professionals to rapidly develop unique, custom sites. This will enable you to develop your own professional-quality Joomla! site without assistance, saving you time and money. You will learn how modules, plugins, components, and templates are constructed, and how to make changes in them, giving you the confidence to make more elaborate changes to your site. On top of this will be a look at common problems Joomla! site developers face and how best to deal with them. You will also learn techniques for building a business with Joomla!, as you step through building a subscription-based web business. Towards the end, you will look at marketing and monetizing this business fully to maximize your return.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Joomla! 1.5x Customization
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Licenses, encryption, and commercialism


There are three very important facets of extensions that many people don't understand properly. These facets are the license under which an extension is released, if an extension is encrypted, and if so, how much is encrypted, and also the commercial nature of a product. Understanding these properly can save us a lot of headaches.

Licenses

There are two main groupings of licenses which are applied to Joomla! Extensions—open source and proprietary.

Open source

Open source licenses are so called because they generally come with a lot of freedom, and only a couple of rules. There are many different types of open source license, but the most famous and most common is the GNU General Public License, or GNU GPL license (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html). This is the license that Joomla! itself is distributed under and has the following major features:

  • The code may be re-distributed without limit by those who acquire it

  • The code may be modified, and even distributed...