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

Some quick advice


You should also be aware that the software is open source and can be viewed by anyone if distributed. Even though the exploits above may seem very difficult on first sight, once the code is available to a hacker, it is no longer trial and error, it is obvious what needs to be attacked. It also means that the more popular your extension becomes, the more nefarious eyes there will be who are taking a close look at it to damage a larger number of sites.

I encourage you to always test for vulnerabilities in your extensions. Too often a "quick fix" or a new feature is the source of problems. Only a testing discipline can catch these before they're a problem.

There are a number of automated testing methods that can be used to improve the code quality, including unit testing, system testing, and automated browser testing such as Selenium. Potentially you could write tests that target some of the vulnerabilities we've discussed in this chapter. You can find out more about testing...