Book Image

Developing Extensions for Joomla! 5

By : Carlos M. Cámara Mora
5 (2)
Book Image

Developing Extensions for Joomla! 5

5 (2)
By: Carlos M. Cámara Mora

Overview of this book

Joomla! 5 is a groundbreaking CMS that helps you take a significant leap into the world of content management systems. Joomla! 5 features a variety of impressive new features that align with current web standards and enable you to experience lightning-fast performance for optimal web page optimization, leverage the new code architecture, and tap into the WebService API, among others. This book takes you on a journey of extending Joomla's capabilities by developing your own extensions. The chapters not only explain the key concepts behind Joomla's architecture but also equip you with the latest techniques for crafting components and plugins. You’ll discover how to leverage existing features within Joomla! to empower your extensions and create tailored solutions. The book takes you from the initial stages of planning your extension development to a fully featured finished product. As you advance, you'll learn invaluable techniques for testing your extension, addressing common issues, and preparing it for publication. The concluding chapters of this comprehensive guide teach you how to test your extension for common issues, along with how to publish the extension for everyone to use. By the end of this book, you’ll have the confidence and skills to complete the cycle of extension development.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Developing Components
8
Part 2: Developing Modules and Plugins
12
Part 3: Extending Templates
15
Part 4: Distributing Your Extensions

Introduction to Joomla! custom fields

Joomla! custom fields were one of the most exciting features added to Joomla! 3.

This feature allows you to add more fields to any data entity in Joomla!. The most common use case here is to add more fields to a Joomla! article, but this feature is not limited to Joomla! articles. In fact, you can find custom fields for components such as com_users (responsible for managing Joomla! users) and com_contact (adding a contact directory to your site).

Using Joomla! custom fields, website administrators can adapt Joomla! without any coding knowledge required. Implementing custom fields in our extension will provide limitless possibilities to the users of our extension.

The first thing that came to mind when I started working with Joomla! custom fields was that I could use any of the Joomla! Standard Form Fields we saw in the previous chapter as custom fields. But to have a custom field type, you need to have a specific plugin for it. In any...