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

Module construction and operation


Unlike components, which typically are different on every page they appear, modules are small, independent programs that usually appear with the same output on multiple pages of our site.

Modules rarely perform major functions, and usually provide summaries, links to other information, or extra minor features to our site. Modules are executed separately to components, so they cannot pass information directly between each other. As a result, modules are always self-contained, though they may reference tables or files used by components or even other modules. They are also usually displayed on the edges of our site, with the main component or content in the center.

The most simple a module can be is two files. One is an XML file (also called a manifest file), which contains information about the module, such as file lists and parameters that tell Joomla! how to handle the module. The other is a PHP file, and it is in the PHP file that all the code for the execution...