In order to develop efficient and well-designed extensions for Joomla!, you must have a basic understanding of objects and classes and the differences between PHP4 and PHP5.
It is essential that you understand the process that Joomla! performs in creating an application because this embodies the complete process of responding to a request. The document is used to determine the format of the response data and as a buffer to store the response data.
Instead of using the request and session hashes in Joomla!, we use the static JRequest
class and the global JSession
object. The JRoute
class enables us to parse and build internal URIs. The JText
class is used to translate strings into different languages. Limitations in PHP mean we must use JString
to handle UTF-8 data; if we do not, we run the risk of corrupting data.
Developing Joomla! extensions requires a solid understanding of the input/output process as well as the location and purpose for the different folders that make up a Joomla...