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 an update server


Joomla! has a built-in update software that allows you to easily update your core Joomla! version, often referred to as one-click updates (even though it usually take a few clicks to launch it). This update mechanism is also available to third-party Joomla! extensions; however, it involves you setting up an update server.

You can try this out on your local development environment. To do so, you will need two Joomla! sites: http://localhost/joomla3, which will be our update server, and http://localhost/joomlatest, which will be our site that we are going to try to update the extensions on. Note that the update server does not need to be a Joomla! site; it could be any folder on a web server.

Install our click-to-call plugin on the http://localhost/joomlatest site, and make sure it's enabled and working. To enable the update manager to be able to check for updates, we need to add some code to the clicktocall.xml installation XML file under /plugins/content/clicktocall...