Summary

In this chapter, we discovered the most interesting features Joomla! offers out of the box for use in our extensions. In some cases, such as the ACL-related features, we only need to add some XML definition to our access.xml form. For other features such as categories, we needed to go a bit further and declare new services. We also saw that enriching our extension with custom fields is a piece of cake, as all we need to do is include the call to the custom fields API. Finally, we added translations to our extension, creating the necessary .ini files and using the Text class to process the translation keys.

The benefits of using these features are huge, and compared to the amount of work we would have to do to write them from scratch, this is a big win.

Now our component offers a common interface for the ACL and a more secure experience for our users. We also developed an easy-to-customize extension as our users can now add their own custom fields to the projects. We also...