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 in a module


As Joomla! development practices have advanced, the demands placed on all aspects of Joomla! development have increased, including those placed upon modules. Developers began to desire more control over when and how modules were displayed without hacking the Joomla! core or their templates. For example, by only showing certain modules to certain user groups, browsers, or even to certain individual users.

However, templates always show the modules that the Joomla! core passes to them and can't control individual modules, only module positions. Also, the Joomla! core has only limited options for displaying modules, such as restricting a module to a certain access group or above (but not the reverse) and restricting it to certain menu item pages.

Sometimes, templates can be modified to perform extra filtering of modules. However, any changes are restricted to specific module positions, and moving them or changing the requirements requires recoding the template again.

As a result...