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

Setting up the database


We need to create a table in our Joomla! database to store the data for this component. Your local development environment should include phpMyAdmin which allows you to access the database directly. If you are using XAMPP, the URL will be http://localhost/phpmyadmin.

  1. Select your database.

  2. On the SQL tab, paste in the following, making sure that you change the jos_ prefix to suit your database:

    CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `jos_folio` (
      `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
      `title` varchar(250) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
      `alias` varchar(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',  
      PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
    ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;
  3. Press the GO button.

For now we are just creating three fields, an id field that contains a unique reference number for that record, the title field, and an alias field.

When we distribute our component to other people, we don't want them to have to manually add the table into their own database, so we can create an install SQL...