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Component and Module Development in Joomla 2.5

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Introduction - Component and Module Development in Joomla 2 Success

Our guest speaker today is Mr. Vishwash Gaur, web delivery manager at Bajaj Allianz Insurance Co. Ltd. Mr. Vishwash Gaur is a project manager with more than 9 years of experience in promoting IT and ITES strategic vision though strategy design and architecture. He enjoys being a part of open source community and regularly participates in PHP, Joomla and active collaboration development. Apart from Microsoft Google analytic certification he owns a degree of masters in science and information technology. His daily life has included many roles including project manager, blogger, open source lover and a motivator, so without further delay I introduce you to our guest speaker Mr. Vishwash Gaur     .

Thank you very much, I would like to start with the presentation right now without any delay. I am moving with the Joomla presentation before we move ahead I would like to tell you that Joomla started with 1.0 then moved to 1.5 and then 1.6, 1.7 and nowadays it is in the version released which is called 2.5. Joomla has basically two different two types of release cycles, one is called STS which is the Short Term Support cycle and another is LTS which is the Long Term Support cycle. The difference between both of these cycles is the duration for which a support is provided by Joomla organization, for STS its 6 months while for LTS it is 18 months so whenever you plan something with the particular version in the production kindly consider that.

For today’s session I personally feel that books are very good but some of the books when it comes to learning something new, trying something new the books are really boring.

And for this particular purpose I am trying to do something different today.

So just sit back relax and let your brain process something new and I am going to add something new to this. For today’s session I believe that you have all these pre-requisites you should basically have the understanding of basic HTML, PHP and MySQL you should be having some interaction in MVC or maybe you just want to get rid of the process recording because when you do a lot of procedural coding it doesn’t allow you for debugging as well as there is no good code reusability so for that particular purpose if you are looking with this presentation and you must have a web server ready because this would be a hands on workshop so whatever I am talking about if you try it at the same moment it will give you better idea of the things and you should have already downloaded Joomla 2.5 package which is available on the link which I am showing on the screen at the moment.

Let’s move to the next, for the agenda of today I would be covering basic idea of content management system, Joomla and the extensions it would give you a starting point to learn about the Joomla. The entire presentation for today is mostly around the beginners who are into Joomla or trying to do something better with Joomla. In this presentation I would cover the download and installation of the Joomla and Joomla extensions and we would be covering the module development as well. I would try to cover the component development as well but with the limited time I might need to skip it.

So when we talk about what is CMS, why use CMS or what is Joomla and Joomla extensions? It comes to our mind directly that we do a lot of static website, we do lot of procedural coding which is very repetitive and we need to do similar things again and again and for this particular purpose something new should be added and I would like to introduce the MVC concept for this. MVC is a module view and controller and if you are doing similar type of things you want to do something quick, then you should use start using the templates.

What is Content Management System?

For the template purpose we use the object oriented code it sounds really confusing but for now just understand that the object oriented code will be around the functions and the classes where you can call a piece of code again and again and you can reuse the particular code again and again.

While the procedural code if you want to do something you have to write it 10 times or 15 times and when it comes to debugging and the testing and everything becomes really difficult. For example, if you are creating a page with a customer review shown on the first page, then on the second page and then on the third page so in the routine procedural coding you will need to put the same code on page 1, 2 and page 3 as well but when it comes to the object oriented coding you would create a function which would be called on the page 1, 2 and 3 so that can be replaced with just a function call and the maintainability of that particular function is much easier because you can change it, update it at any moment and it will reflect on all three pages which doesn’t happen in the earlier case. So that the concept of CMS comes from here, there the people were doing a lot of procedural coding and they realized that there should be a template based system where they can do the repeated things quite easily so framework arises and with a templating system a CMS arises which is known as content management system.

As per Wikipedia I would like to just tell you that the content management system is much easier than this definition here. In the content management system you can publish your contents, you can edit, manage everything can be done dynamically, you can add your media, you can add further extension to this which can enhance the functionality of your website or the web application which you are looking for. Now a day’s a CMS can be a blog, an E-commerce store and much more than that.

So the question arises why do we need to look for a CMS? The question for the CMS arise with a couple of problems I have highlighted few of them like the poor code structure issues, when we do a lot of procedural coding it goes into the poor code sometimes we forget putting comment, sometimes we do a direct call to the database. That particular code when it is with the poor code structure it is not even azure friendly because when you are checking with the end validator for the HTML you won’t find it HTML or CSS validated. The internal site search is not available, dynamic updates are not possible so as I earlier said that if there are three pages and you are putting reviews on all of those pages then you cannot easily manage all of them. The features are limited with the static (( )) you can’t put (( )) so easily on to it and since there are lot of static contents and lot of static pages the cost maintenance really grows with the time and in this situation you would realize that if there are 100 pages for a particular website like for an (( )) company it has 150 pages in it and they just need to put a HTML in the footer of this it will take at least a day because it has to be changed in all the pages. But if this is modular and you have a footer module with you and you want to do it with just a single code it will be done in a minute or so.

In this situation the solution comes with the CMS which has a dynamic content manager, additional features can be added using extension manager, low cost to maintain because you need to work on lesser pages, very search engine friendly code because it is (( )) code there are template management and of course if you follow the popular content management system like Joomla you would notice that MVC architecture and other design patterns are very well followed in this which really helps you in the long term.

What is Joomla?

Now the question comes what is Joomla? For the very beginners I would like to say when people were deciding the name of Joomla let me take you back into little bit more history Joomla actually originated from the mambo, mambo was the foundation who actually develop a mambo framework or mambo CMS. Later on mambo foundation decided to move to a proprietary code and then Joomla took place because the development team left the mambo foundation and they started their own CMS which was called Joomla and so Joomla was in the process of being founded. Then they were coming across 1000’s of names one of the name came from Swahili which was the Jumla which means all together and in the phonetic way it is called Joomla. Joomla is one of the PHP based content management system and one of the real power of this CMS is in the scalability and the flexibility and this scalability is possible with the use of extensions and the content management it provides.

Joomla lies on three different layers as shown on the screen it is the Extension layer, Application layer and Framework layer and module components and templates are on the top of the layer these are the layer which provides the added feature to a Joomla CMS, rest features are directly quadratic with the application.

Joomla has different extensions and why do we need extension first of all? First of all we need the extension to extend the default functionality of Joomla and there are different types of extensions earlier there were 5 types of extension like component, modules, plugins, languages, templates in the Joomla 1.6 onwards we have added two more extension type which is the libraries and packages, I will quickly cover the components, modules and all of these. Components are basically on page extension which actually covers the entire page and it has a back end as well. Module is mostly a particular box or which is shown somewhere on the page there can be more than one module on a page but there can’t be more than one component on a page.

Plugins provides the backend functionality while the languages are used to provide additional language support which is very helpful in the translation. With the help of templates you can change the look and feel of your website or the web application in a minute so. The packages and the libraries are the newly added one’s the packages are the bundled extensions there are more than one extension types are coupled, libraries provide support to another extension.

How to download and Install Joomla?

Let’s quickly start with the downloading and installing Joomla because I consider this presentation is for the beginners.

To download the Joomla now you can possibly start the hands on workshop as well because for the rest of the slides I would be covering mostly whatever you can immediately do on your computer as well so you can download the Joomla from the given link on the screen. I have highlighted this particular package which is latest package and you can download this package. Once you download the package you will find a zip file which you can simply unzip and you would need to place it on the root or a desired folder on your web server.

So say for example, I have created a folder in my D drive and then SEDOS and then SMBAP and another SEDOS so you can see that for example I have placed my files here so similar way you can place your files here and simply go to your file path which would be something like HTTP and the folder name and it will automatically call the installation files.

Based on this you need to select the language there will be a next button it will take you to the next screen.

Here the installation requirement will be checked if you have all these requirements. It also provides some recommended settings here, some might be yes, some might be no based on your server configuration but as long as it meets the minimum requirements you will be able to click on the next button and it will move on.

It is the Joomla GNU public license, simply the license which is with the software you have to accept it and go to the next.

Next screen is for the database configuration where you have to add your database details like the username, password, desired database name and the table prefix. This table prefix feature has been added in the new versions after 1.5 so you have to define a table prefix for the security reasons. The another good thing is if you provide an authorized user details MySQL user details than Joomla will automatically create a database for you, you would need not create a separate database using the PHP ( ) or something.

Here are the FTP configurations, most of the time you won’t need it because you don’t want to connect your (( )) and the FTP all together.

One of the last schemes is the main configuration scheme where you can start up the site team and admin login details for the back-end. Here is one more important thing it is very useful for the beginners whenever you are installing this make sure you click on the sample data installation. It will actually install the sample data while you are installing the Joomla and once you are completed with the installation it will give you a sample website ready which you can easily customaries, change menu items change contents, change some area and you can go on with a (( )) website.

Once you click this button you would be able to see this website in front of you.

Similarly if you click the admin button you would be able to see the administration panel very easily.

If you want more details on the content management if you have set up your website quite easily than I would suggest you to visit the docs.joomla.org which is one of the great link in the Joomla documentation you would find how to manage contents and how to do much more with this you would be able to find little bit more (( )) as well which will allow you to get into more of Joomla.

What is a Module and why should we use a module?

Now we come to the module and component which is little bit focus of this presentation so I try to cover what is module and what is component and then we move on to the next slide.

As I said earlier that modules are mostly used for the rendering purpose on the page which displays typically like a box or could be anything else. A simple example for a module could be a login a banner which is shown somewhere on the screen or there could be a menu item which could be even the login, which could be the module apart from this if you want to display some sophisticated information like the reviews and some related products this could be your modules. So another question comes to our mind why should we use a module? First thing it can work a standalone it doesn’t need any database or something if you want to display a static information at 10 places you can simply do it using a custom HTML module.

As per this example it is good for code reusability as well and once it is linked with the component it can have a database linking as well so you can have a component in the backend which for example, stores and records the customer reviews and you can simply show those customer reviews at any page whenever you want. So for the conventions the module name should be in small letters, yes it is a convention and the module name should have a prefix mod_ so mod_ would be a prefix and your module name could be anything. Obviously you would need to skip the most common system needs which are already in news.

Here is the example of module we have a menu as the module, we have breadcrumb as a module, we have a login box as a module, we have some pole and some latest items again the module and the set box even as a module and the another new section for this. The interesting thing with this particular search is it is linked with three different type of extensions. For example if you are seeing this search box it is a module but the functionality of this is supported by a plugin and when you see the search results it is actually a component so like I said earlier there could be more than 1 module on a page but there can be only one component on a page so in this screen there is one component which is the content component I am showing on the screen if there would be search results so there would be no more contents on the search results will be shown then that would be the next component.

Module positions like I have shown on this particular screen there are different module positions and every module position depends on the template and when you want to add a particular module position in template you would need to use a code something like this and this code will allow you to add a new module position in the template you can find template file under the template folder and whatever template you have created there is a simply a file called index.PHP and you can add a new module position there. Yes there can be more than one modules on a page.

When you are working on modules and module positions mostly the templates you would need to find module positions if you are not working on templates site there are other possibilities when you would need to define a position to a particular module so say for example if you want know where should I place my search module so you would need to know what types of modules are available there.

So you would go to the Joomla admin panel I would quickly go through this you would need to go to the Joomla admin panel.

Once you login this you would need to go to the extensions stop menu and then select the template manager.

Once you are on the template manager please click on the options button.

It would take you to this screen where you can enable settings to preview module positions. This particular feature was added in the Joomla 1.6 version onwards, so before to that you are directly able to add (( )) on the page URL which was the question mark TP is (( )) to 1 but from 1.6 onwards you will need to enable this here and then only you can save module positions in the template using the short code.

This is added security feature with this method so say for example if you want to see the template positions, module positions in your template you would need to enter your site address then the page name if it is and question mark tp is equal to 1this is the short code which you should use. If you use this it would review the module positions available on the template all of these are the module positions.

 

Let’s move little bit more into the development side of it I am trying to get more and more complex with the programming site using this way. When you create a module it typically has 6 files in it one of them is the modulename.xml file it typically stores the installation related information into the file so whenever you install a new module it will take the configuration from here and we will do the necessary installation automatically. If you have setup some static configuration details it will constantly taken from this particular file.

The next file is the module name.php this is the initialization file for the module so whenever a module is used on the page this file is called at the first and it creates connection between all the other required files so in this particular case you can assume it as a controller and the next file comes helper.php which can be your model and then your use comes in the template folder which is default.php so for the helper.php it simply has some static functions to use there could be some very basic calculations usually module doesn’t have the manipulation functionality at their own they have to rely on the components for this and it is supported with the component you can fetch data from data base as well. kindly note there is an index.html file which is kept in all the folders of modules because simply an empty file created to ensure that directly browsing is not possible so whenever someone is trying to open the directory directly this particular file will be opened and the user won’t be able to see the directory structure or the contents in it.

What is a Component and why should we use a Component?

Now quickly come to the component part like I said earlier components used to take up the whole page area for the display and these are considered as the mini applications which brings a major functionality on the entire page or to the website so like the content management is a type of component, banner management is type of component and there are other components like if you want to add the site map you want to add an E-commerce functionality, you want to add a blog functionality, you want to add a forum functionality, you want to add news letter functionality so all of these are mini applications in their own nature and you can add these functionality with the help of the components.

The questions comes again why should we use a component when we can do something with procedural coding? No, to add a more functional part we should use component and obviously there is code reusability as well with this particular thing you can handle a component from the backend for the data entry purpose and you can use the component for the front-end display purpose so if there is say banner management component you can add banners from the back-end and it can be displayed using the banner module in the front. For the conventions of the component, component name should be prefixed by “com_” com_componentname for example and yes it should also be in small letters.

Same as the module component position depends again on the template, usually in the content area we place the component position with the help of this particular code the component position can be defined, there can be only one component on a page with this code, so if you take an example of the component.

Here is the banner management component, you create a banner in the back-end banner is created and then with the help of the banner front-end module you place it at any defined position and it reflects anywhere you want it. So this is banner and then banner is created in the back-end and then a module is added once that module is added in the front panel it will be seen.

Component structure is much more typical and complex than the module, you would be able to see a long list of files here which I would cover gradually and with the more time so for now you can just have a look there are lot of files, I am simply taking a hello world component example here, you have different type of controllers, you have different type of views, there are two different type of components one for the set front end another for the website back-end, so for the front end you would see that there are typical controller views and model files and for the website back-end there are typically again the model gives controller files. We have added the language functionality as well here so as you have seen in the beginning the component could be multi language as well.

Now we have installed a Joomla on our demo server, we know that a basic website is ready with us so things are ready with us we just want to see how to further extend the Joomla, how to add a new functionality to the Joomla so we would be installing some extension to the Joomla and to use some of the readymade extensions you can use the Joomla extension directory which is available on the extension.Joomla.org and from this extension directory you can download some of the existing extensions those can be used to simply add the functionality to your website or web application.

To install extension simply log into the administrator panel go to the top menu extension manager and once you click on this you would come to this particular screen. Here 3 types of installation options are available you can either upload a package file you can install it directly from directory or you can install from URL. This directory would be somewhere on your local PC or network mirror this would be an online part install from URL would be an online URL where you can simply near path of zip file for the component or if we are already downloaded with zip file you can simply browse it here and upload it.

Once that file is uploaded or installed with any of these methods it will simply give a success message. For some reasons you would notice that the success message is not shown or some failure is there so you can possibly look into the exact reason that could be shown somewhere here on the screen instead of the success message the failure message would be shown. For most of the components which are available on the Joomla extension directory which is the JVD you would notice that most of the extensions are,

I move on to the next part since we already done the installation of the extension here as I assume. The next screen for the post installation part goes to the components and extensions in the top menu when you install component post installation it will be shown under the components menu and if you install a module it will be shown under the module manager in the extension top menu so if you click on if there is a component it will be shown in the list of the components menu since we have not yet handled any components so we have to move to module management part once you click on the module manager you would be able to see a list of available modules, you can use any of the existing modules or you can create a new module by clicking on the new button available there.

Once you click on the new button you would need to select a module type there are different module test, we will be covering a new module development here that will also be shown on this particular screen in sometime. Once you create new module you would be able to add some setting to this define a position or set up some different other configurations to this. 

Video length - 01:49:18

229 attendees

Conducted on - 29 Jun,2012

11177 views

About Speaker
Mr. Vishwash GaurWeb Delivery Manager
Vishwash Gaur is a Project manager with more than 9 years of experience in promoting IT and ITES strategic vision through strategy, design and architecture. He enjoys being part of open source community and regularl...
As you gain experience with procedural coding in PHP, you notice that there are tasks which are performed in a routine fashion and a lot of code which can be simply reused. What if you can save your time on these points using some of the existing PHP development frameworks and/or content management systems which allows MVC architecture and object oriented programming concepts to follow at ease for you?In this beginner webinar on the topic, I would cover a quick introduction of content management system with focus on PHP based content management system “Joomla”. Joomla is considered as dynamic portal engine and content management system, and allows you to develop variety of systems from website, ecommerce store to a complex social network with the help of pre-built features i.e. caching, content management, web services, templates, and more.The real power of Joomla lies in the scalability which can be achieved with the use of custom extensions which include templates, language files, plugins, modules and components. This webinar would further cover quick hands on workshop to download and setup Joomla on a demo server, and developing a simple module and component for Joomla version 2.5.This webinar will cover:

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