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

Plugin composition and operation


Like a module, in its simplest form, a plugin can consist of only two files, a PHP file with the actual code for the plugin, and an XML manifest that tells Joomla! what to do with the plugin.

Despite this apparent simplicity, plugins are very powerful, and more difficult to understand than modules and components.

Plugins are designed to run at certain times during the execution of our site, and they perform actions that can only be done at these times.

For example, in our sample site we want to hide some of our content from guests, and only show it to paid subscribers. This action can only be performed when we are actually preparing the content to be displayed, because we need to wait until we identify if the viewer is a guest or subscriber, and then make the changes to the content dynamically.

In a different example, checking if a subscriber's subscription is valid is something that only needs to be done when they try to login, and not on every page load.

Plugin...