Joomla! Community Magazine™

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.

If you’ve been in the development business for awhile then you probably have a substantial library of code that you frequently use. It’s your work belt, your briefcase, your attaché that follows you into whatever project that you happen to be working on. You know, trust and love your code base because you wrote it and understand it intimately. Whether another developer would consider it up-to-standards or pretty is irrelevant — it works and so you use it whenever and wherever you can. It helps you follow that sacred tenet of programming, Don’t Repeat Yourself, that we all hold dear.

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?

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?

On quite a few occasions fellow developers ask me which is the best way to get started with Joomla! Development. Among other things, I always propose that they should have a complete reference of the Joomla! Framework API. The only book which was up to this task was "Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development", albeit a bit outdated since it was written when Joomla!1.5 was still in beta, some two and a half years ago. When Packt Publishing announced that they'd release the updated "Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development (Update)" I was ecstatic! So, here you go, I reviewed the new edition of the book and I'm willing to share my experience with you.