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 customization


When we start out as a Joomla! developer, it is often much easier, and takes a lot less time, to edit an existing extension that does most of what we want than it is to create a completely new one. So, we will find some extensions that almost fit what we want to do, and then modify them to fill the gaps.

Modifying top ten members

Even though this is outside of our goals list, we want to put up some simple modules to fill up the site with interesting information. Since, we want to encourage people to participate in the forum, it might be worth putting in some modules that show our top posters and rewarding them with having their name up on the site.

Looking around on the JED, we can find a recent threads module, but there is no top posters module for Joo!BB. There is, however, one for Fireboard, another popular Joomla! Forum component, called Fireboard Top 10 Active 10. So we will take that one, and modify it to use Joo!BB, and just show the top 10 posters instead.

Step...