Chapter 9. Behind the Scenes: Plug-ins

So far, our restaurant reviews have been relatively easy to navigate to, and the site is also user-friendly. However, our restaurant critics want us to make things simpler for them. We may periodically want to create feature articles for collections, such as Late Night Dining Highlights or An All Asian Appetite. We want to make it easier for the critics to link to the reviews within these articles, and we also want to make the reviews searchable, along with the articles.

These new features can be handled through plug-ins. Joomla! provides plug-ins as a way of running pieces of code when certain events occur. Among other tasks, plug-ins can be used to start HTML editors, perform searches, format content, and log users into multiple systems at once. Plug-ins are able to interact with components and modules without modifying their source code. The plug-ins we will write will take us through the following topics: