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

Component composition and operation


With some careful coding, a simple component at its most basic could be assembled with only two files, an XML manifest and a PHP file. In practical use however, the vast majority of components will have at least three files. If they are written according to the best practices for Joomla! Extension development, they will be more likely to have at least 5-10 files. A very complex component, such as a shopping cart or forum, can easily have 50 or more files.

With so many files floating around, how do we know what is what?

This really depends on how the extension was developed. A well-written extension should be organized according to best practices, with similar files grouped together in separate folders. Then it should be relatively straightforward to understand what the files do.

Out with the old, in with the new—MVC

With the release of Joomla! 1.5, the way components were constructed and how they operated changed considerably.

The biggest change was the move...