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

Hacking the core


Even though the practice is dying out, there are still several extensions around that make changes to the core Joomla! files. This practice was much more common in Joomla! 1.0 than in 1.5, as 1.5 provides the ability to replace or override a lot of core functionally without having to make changes to the core code.

Most often, core hacks are used to provide enhancements or extra functionality to the user or access level systems within Joomla!, as these functions were very difficult to influence from outside the core until recently.

More commonly though, people are not hacking the core code, but making changes to the default templates included in Joomla!. Rather than acquiring a new template, they just make changes to one of the existing default ones.

Both of these practices, hacking the core and changing default templates can set site owners up for many difficulties. The most important one being that if we update our site to a newer version of Joomla!, then there is a good...