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

Adding tags to our component


The major new feature introduced in Joomla! 3.1 is the tagging component, which can also be integrated with third-party components. Tags are a kind of metadata that allow you to assign a keyword or multiple keywords to an item, and are popular with blogging sites. They also solve the problem of assigning articles and other contents to multiple categories.

At the time of writing, I am using Joomla! 3.1.1; however, the documentation for tags indicates that there will be some changes made in 3.1.2, so I recommend you refer to http://docs.joomla.org/Using_Tags_in_an_Extension for the latest documentation. Another useful reference is https://github.com/elinw/joomla-cms/wiki/Using-tags-in-an-extension.

The first thing we want to do is to add tags to our form, so edit /administrator/components/com_folio/models/forms/folio.xml, and add the tags field. Well, actually this doesn't need to be the first thing you do, but I like to add the visual components first, and then...