Joomla! Community Magazine™

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.

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.

Ever feel like you're repeating the same tasks over and over while developing Joomla! extensions? It's a common feeling when developing for any framework but one thing that all frameworks have in common is that they make it incredibly easy to create blocks of reusable code.