Introduction

Joomla framework is written in PHP so, guess what, if you want to develop Joomla extensions you need to be able to write PHP. If you are not familiar with PHP (I am not) the good news is PHP is really easy to learn and it is a valuable asset on your quest for web development. After acquiring the basic coding skills, you should also invest some time looking at existing open source Joomla extensions (trying to understand what the hell is happening) and the Joomla API reference.

Along your way you‘ll need to appreciate object oriented programming concepts due to the Joomla framework makes heavy use of it. I’ll be honest, I have tried a lot in the past to avoid OOP but, now that I have some exposure to it I think, it’s not that bad, you get used to it after say, 25 years or something?

Now, as I start playing with PHP and OOP, I try to write small pieces of code that are self-explanatory examples of various OOP concepts. If you have some background, the single best place to look at is the PHP OOP manual. Of course, there are tones of PHP websites around and well written books.

So, this section is by no means a complete tutorial, just a few examples and some discussion regarding PHP and OOP. I am saying it again, this is not a complete PHP reference nor a good tutorial for starters, it is more or less my personal notes. If this is your first exposure to programming I would simply suggest: read something else.