Book Image

Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development

Book Image

Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface

Chapter 6. Module Development

We now have an efficient system for managing reviews and taking in comments. However, visitors have to go to the component to see the reviews. The front page of our site will probably have a few articles introducing the site, but it would be nice if we could pull the content directly from the reviews and display this there as well. This is where modules can help. You can use them to fetch data and display it almost anywhere on the page. In this chapter, we will cover the following topics on module development:

  • Registering the module in the database

  • Creating and configuring a basic module

  • Getting and setting parameters

  • Centralizing data access and output using helper classes

  • Selecting display options using layouts

  • Displaying the latest reviews

  • Displaying a random review

Registering the module in the database

As with the component, we will have to register the module in the database so that it can be referenced in the backend and used effectively. Entering a record...