Community Magazine

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!

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.

The Problem: Testing software has been a huge challenge as long as software has been around. A big part of this is the simple mathematics of if / then statements.

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.

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.

From early Mambo days until today, Joomla! has constantly amended and extended functionality. With Joomla! 1.5, quality and user experience changed to the better, and it did so with version 2.5. Moving to GitHub has made it easier to contribute and to see what things different developers are working on. Now, the focus more and more goes to the next logical step: Automated tests.

During the first week of March Joomla! Day Guatemala was took place, with many speakers and workshops. There were people who were very interested in Joomla! and web development, but also those who were particularly interested in the Joomla! Platform.

There’s a new release in the Joomla! Press series this week: Joomla! Programming by Mark Dexter and Louis Landry.

As you may have directly experienced, in the registration form of a large number of websites, and in the most important such as Google or Yahoo for example, typing an account username immediately triggers the availability check of the choosen username, before the entire form is submitted. Let's see if it is possible to use the same technique on the registration form of Joomla! 2.5 based sites.

Clients grumble too often about a hard-to-use CMS.  The problem, often, is delivering to clients edit screens that are unchanged from how they come out-of-the-box.  We can do better. In this example we’ll be tailoring a complex edit screen into something streamlined for a particular client.  The technique shown here can be applied to any extension and for any client with specific needs.