Joomla! Community Magazine™

In the previous articles we covered setting the stage and beginning the component structure. In this tutorial we will be focusing on the details, writing those functions and files that are core to this extension and actually making the extension start to work and hopefully start unifying the entire component and accomplishing the overall goal.

Extension developers provide a large number of extensions for Joomla!. But as you may know, some of them are not compatible with many templates. Also, in many cases Joomla extensions do not have standard style and script designs, and because of this many users are forced to hack their extensions. In this article I am going to provide and explain 20 suggestions for better style and script design of Joomla extensions and maybe these simple techniques and patterns will help you! Read the second part of this article now.

In order to have a good working example for this tutorial series on Joomla! 3.0 component development I have chosen to walk through the process by actually writing an extension. This component will be available for review and download by visiting the accompanying site referenced throughout this and future articles. My goal is to write a rather robust component beyond a simple “Hello World” component to fully demonstrate key points in actual component development.

I struggled with the necessity of this first article in an extension development series for a while, and finally decided that it was indeed a worthwhile post. It is important to make sure you build a proper foundation and there are several aspects of writing a Joomla! 3.0 component that should be planned right from the very first day. This is the first in a series of articles about extension development, which would not be complete without taking time to discuss the initial steps involved in planning and structuring the extension correctly. Here are those steps I have found to be most effective in beginning a successful Joomla! extension.

We are on the brink of a new shift in the web and Joomla has the opportunity to be an early adopter in this shift. Taking part will help place Joomla ahead of other open source CMS's in terms of functionality, increase website conversions, and result in an overall better user experience. So what is this shift I'm talking about? It's the dynamic personalization of a website for the individual visitor. In this JCM whiteboard I will be exploring this concept and challenging Joomla developers to embrace and develop this concept.

These days almost all Joomla! developers have a demo site to display their component for testing. It really doesn’t matter if you give your component away or if you are offering it for purchase; most users expect to be able to test the functionality and “see it in action” before they purchase or waste their time downloading and installing on their own site. This means as a component developer you have to keep a demo site up and running at all times with the latest version of your component.

In this article I'm going to show you how you can make use of Interceptor Filters via annotations within a Joomla application. It makes use of the principle of Aspect-Oriented Programming.

Extension developers provided large number of extensions for Joomla!. But as you know, some of them are not compatible with many templates. Also, in many cases Joomla! extensions do not have standard style and script designs, and because of this many users force to hack the extensions. In this article I am going to explain 20 suggestions for better style and script designing of Joomla! extensions, and maybe these simple techniques and patterns will help you!

Since the introduction of Joomla! 2.5, an updates notification system is now available for both Joomla and third-party extensions. In this article we will see how to use the native Joomla updates notification system for all extensions except templates.

What can you do to start automated unit testing when you're writing extensions for a complex existing system like Joomla? It's not always easy, but with a few simple changes you can get started. Once you've started, remember the first rule, "Break all Dependencies!" Using some special capabilities built into PHPUnit, along with some of these simple techniques and patterns, you can get to the land of testability.