Our example project

We will build extensions to create, find, promote, and cross-link restaurant reviews. A component will handle common data points seen across all reviews, such as price range, reservations, cuisine type, and location. Your visitors will be able to search and sort the reviews, and add their own criteria, to zero in on their dining options for the evening.

Some modules will highlight new reviews, and draw the attention of frequent visitors. Finally, one plug-in will pull pieces of the reviews into feature articles, and another will integrate them into searches.

To prepare for this project, you need to install a fresh copy of Joomla! 1.5 on a web server with PHP and MySQL. If you prefer to use one computer exclusively to complete this project (and do not have a local web server), the best thing to do would probably be to download and install a bundled and pre-configured package such as WAMP for Windows (http://www.wampserver.com) or MAMP for Mac (http://mamp.info). This way, you will be able to work with all of the files on your local file system.