Introduction

I know you are ready to jump onto the tutorial pages; here is a quick introduction on how the module development tutorial is laid out and a few tips.

One of the things that happens to me (and I think I am not alone) is when I read other people’s code is I don’t understand what I am reading at all. Honestly, when I catch a web page or a book that has some text and some example code, my eyes jump straight ahead to the code, then I get this terrible feeling that the code is to clever for me to understand and I quit. This is something I experience very often and the only cure to it is persistence. The more devoted you are the more chances you have. And if you ride the circle many times the circle will eventually get easy to ride.

Now, for the module development tutorial, you will need an appreciation of object oriented programming concepts and PHP. So, start from there to ensure you can easily follow the examples presented here.

• Joomla modules in their simplest form consist of two files, the main php file that contains the actual code and the xml file that contains all module attributes. Page 1 will give you the standard “hello world” example.
• Joomla application framework provides us with a wealth of classes and methods to build upon; pages 2 and 3 demonstrate how to access common objects.
• The most interesting thing with modules is that they can be configurable. As you have seen with most modules, you can have various parameters available at the backend to control the module behavior at the frontend; pages 4 and 5 will assist you on that.
• Since your entire site data is stored in the database, to build a module you most likely need to access the database; this is what page 6 presents.
• Joomla framework provides a nice exception handling mechanism which is important to use if you want to provide quality code, pages 7 and 8 demonstrate its use.
• After understanding the basic concepts, the specifications of a fairly simple module is put down to demonstrate the basic principles, this is page 9.
• One of the things required for our first module is to build links to existing articles, page 10 discusses how to do this.
• One of the skills you will need to improve with Joomla development is SQL, the more complex are the things you need to fetch from the database, the more complex your SQL statement becomes. I hope page 11 will help you to get into it.
• Last thing, Joomla supports the use of templates which is something you may find nice to have. Moreover with web site development, we should always strive towards separating the main code functionality from the presentation layer. These ideas are presented on pages 12, 13 and 14.

Enjoy!