Preface

Joomla! is one of the most popular Content Management Systems (CMS) around. What started in 2005 as a fork of Mambo, now has nothing to do with it and has evolved to a great standard of security, efficiency, and usability. In all these years Joomla! API has grown to a stable and functional framework, and it embraces the modern PHP development standards. This book is about the latest Joomla! architecture and how to develop extensions that take advantage of it. The 14 chapters are grouped into 4 sections, each of which can be read individually, but if you are not familiar with Joomla! development, I recommend following the chapters sequentially.

Part 1 covers all topics related to component development and provides a full vision of the current Joomla! architecture that will be used in the other parts of the book.

Part 2 of the book explores module and plugin development and introduces the Joomla! Command Line Interface. This part will settle your understanding of Joomla’s new architecture.

Part 3 of the book covers template development. We go first through template overrides to understand how a template works and we then introduce Joomla! child templates. When you know how to develop a child template, developing a parent template is just a matter of adding the remaining files.

Finally, in the last part of the book, we explore what we need to take into account before distributing our extensions. We cover testing, security practices, and of course how to package and distribute our extensions.