I'm a firm believer that it's the simple things in life that matter the most. I feel the same way about web sites, software design and development. I find that developing simple solutions which solve complex issues can be a good challenge. One of the biggest challenges one faces when creating "simple" is figuring out where simple stops and where complex starts. It's really a case of learning to tell yourself ‘no’, and that's very hard to do.
While at JAB11 last month, I heard comments from more than a few developers that it could be difficult to get their code accepted into the Joomla! core. So I committed to publishing a JCM article to try and address those concerns. In the first article of this two part series, we will take an overview of how the existing development process works. Developers are encouraged to post their questions and comments below this article throughout the month of June (the earlier the better), so that some of those questions and comments may be used as the basis for next month's concluding article in this series.
When it comes to creating an extension for Joomla — or any type of software — documentation will always be an important part of that extension’s success.
Joomla is a decent CMS with very nice features. It works great for the end user and has many components ready to use from the online world. What I don't like personally, as a developer, is the model implementation in Joomla. For me the way ' model and table' classes are implemented, just doesn't feel right to me. Also it is very difficult to get other models in a controller or an other model class. With Symfony I have worked with Doctrine regularly and in this blog I'll show you how to use Doctrine for your own component in Joomla. Doctrine is an Object Relational Mapping framework and offers you a persistence library. This not the holy grail and you should determine if you need the extra overhead and if you are comfortable with it.
The Joomla! Setup is a series of interviews with developers in the Joomla! community, talking about the tools they use to get the job done, inspired by the setup. Can you tell who it is?
Have you ever been frustrated with Joomla!’s linear approach to templates? I’ve developed several web applications in Joomla! where it would have been useful to be able to include a template inside of another template – an internal menu system, a special footer for specific components, etc – and in the past I’ve gotten around this limitation with good old fashioned PHP include statements. While this method works we can have much prettier and more maintainable code by extending Joomla!’s JView class to support this functionality.
Creating software that works is hard work, it takes time, expertise, and experience. After all that hard work the last thing a developer wants to do is spend time answering “silly” questions asked by the users using that software. The best way to fend off most basic questions is to tell users how to use the software – to provide documentation!
Not everyone is, or wants to be a programmer. However, you don’t have to be to help find and track down bugs in software. Using a few techniques, you can often get to the bottom of a problem and determine if it is a bug, user error, or something else. Since software development is an ongoing process, you may find yourself wondering when you come across a problem if it is a bug, or not.
A fact of web development is that no two people use the exact same tools – why should Javascript frameworks be any different? Whether you use jQuery, Prototype, YUI, Dojo, or something in between, we should all have the freedom of choice when it comes to our development tools.
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