Professional Joomla!

Chapter 6. Advanced Extensions: Components

In Chapter 5, you developed a few simple extensions to grasp the basic aspects of Joomla's extensibility. You were instructed to construct the various modules with a simple text editor, since the code was rudimentary and already debugged. Professional development, however, requires far greater control of the project. For example, to develop a multi-module and component-based shopping cart application, a developer would need to coordinate multiple development files, and may need to work in conjunction with other programmers.

This chapter outlines the work process of creating an advanced Joomla extension. You will be using a professional development system (Eclipse), source code control (through Subversion), and generating project documentation (through phpDocumentor). By following this development process from beginning to end, you will have a better idea of how professional Joomla applications can be created in an enterprise situation.

Setting Up a Development System

Chapter 5 has you use any text editor to create the program files and save them in the Joomla system. The quick-and-dirty use of text files is one of the advantages of creating programs for a PHP system, since you aren't locked into the overhead and complexity of using a complete integrated development environment (IDE).

Approaching the development process by the seat of your pants is fine when you need to throw together a simple module or make a small edit. But any project that ...