Book Image

Learning Joomla! 3 Extension Development - Third Edition

By : Timothy John Plummer
Book Image

Learning Joomla! 3 Extension Development - Third Edition

By: Timothy John Plummer

Overview of this book

Joomla 3 is the first of the major open source content management systems that was meant to be mobile friendly by default. Joomla uses object-oriented principles, is database agnostic, and has the best mix of functionality, extensibility, and user friendliness. Add to that the fact that Joomla is completely community driven, and you have a winning combination that is available to everyone, and is the perfect platform to build your own custom applications. "Learning Joomla! 3 Extension Development" is an integrated series of practical, hands-on tutorials that guide you through building and extending Joomla plugins, modules, and components. With Joomla having been downloaded well over 35 million times, there is a huge market for Joomla extensions, so you could potentially earn some extra cash in your spare time using your newly acquired Joomla extension development skills. We will start with developing simple plugins and modules, and then progress to more complex backend and frontend component development. Then we will try our hand at ethical hacking, so you will learn about common security vulnerabilities and what you can do to avoid them. After that we will look at how you can prepare your extensions for distribution and updates, as well as how you can extend your components with various plugins and modules. Finally, you will end up with a fully functioning package of extensions that you can use on your own site or share with others. If you want to build your own custom applications in Joomla, then "Learning Joomla! 3 Extension Development" will teach you everything you need to know in a practical, hands-on manner.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Learning Joomla! 3 Extension Development
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


Now you should have some idea about the differences between a plugin, a module and a component. We discussed what Joomla! version you should support in your development (which is definitely Joomla! 3, and possibly Joomla! 2.5 while it remains the current long term release). We touched on some of the new features of Joomla! 3 such as Bootstrap and jQuery. We talked about why you should use the GNU GPL for your license, and the associated benefit of a JED listing. We discussed some of the common business models used by Joomla! extension developers and then talked about the tools that you will need to use to develop Joomla! extensions. We briefly looked at the coding standards, and then talked about MVC and why we should use the Legacy classes. We talked about upgrading existing Joomla! 2.5 extensions to Joomla! 3, and we also talked about forking. Now get ready for the next chapter where we will start to get our hands dirty with some coding that you can follow along with to create your first Joomla! extension.