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

Where do I start?


To get started with plugin development, first we need to decide what problem we are trying to solve or what functionality we are trying to implement.

Let's assume that you have a website with various phone numbers listed on the site, and that this site is popular with people who access the site through a smartphone. Currently, to call one of the numbers, the user has to remember the number to dial it, or perhaps they jot it down on a piece of paper or attempt to select and copy the number through their browser. This is not very user-friendly, a much better way to do this would be to change the phone number to a click-to-call link, so the user can just click the phone number and their phone will call it. Now, you could go through the website and manually change all the phone numbers to these links, but that would be inconvenient. Assuming our phone number is in the format 1234-5678, we could change it to this HTML code to create a click-to-call link.

<a href="tel: 1234...