Table Of ContentJoomla! 1.5x Customization
Make Your Site Adapt to Your Needs
Create and customize a professional Joomla! site that
suits your business requirements
Daniel Chapman
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by David Martone on 16th September 2009
710 South Avenue West, , Westfield, , 07090
Joomla! 1.5x Customization
Make Your Site Adapt to Your Needs
Copyright © 2009 Packt Publishing
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First published: August 2009
Production Reference: 1180809
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton
Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-847195-16-6
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Vinayak Chittar ([email protected])
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This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by David Martone on 16th September 2009
710 South Avenue West, , Westfield, , 07090
Credits
Author Editorial Team Leader
Daniel Chapman Akshara Aware
Reviewers Project Team Leader
Lesley A. Harrison Lata Basantani
Oland T. Whitecotton, III
Tom Canavan Project Coordinator
Rajashree Hamine
Acquisition Editor
Douglas Paterson Proofreader
Jeff Orloff
Development Editor
Dilip Venkatesh Drawing Coordinator
Nilesh Mohite
Technical Editor
Bhupali Khule Production Coordinator
Aparna Bhagat
Indexer
Monica Ajmera Cover Work
Aparna Bhagat
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This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by David Martone on 16th September 2009
710 South Avenue West, , Westfield, , 07090
About the Author
Daniel Chapman started his career as an Oracle database consultant and trainer,
working for various Australian universities, telecommunication companies, and
also Oracle Australia. This work helped him develop a keen sense of the value of
development standards and analysis processes.
After ten years in the Oracle arena, he wanted a change of pace, so he moved to
Japan and started working in web development in 2004. He quickly picked up PHP,
JavaScript, HTML, and CSS while experimenting with various CMSes.
Finally deciding on Joomla! as his CMS of choice, Daniel initially began working as a
consultant, developing sites and producing a few small extensions before starting one
of the first Open Source Extension Clubs: NinJoomla (http://www.ninjoomla.com).
Eventually, he changed the club's name to Ninja Forge (http://ninjaforge.com),
and both he and the club have since become quite well known in the Joomla! sphere.
While this is Daniel's first book as an author, he has been a technical reviewer
on several books including Choosing an Open Source CMS (Packt Publishing) and
Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development (Packt Publishing).
I would like to thank my wife, Kyoko, for her seemingly endless
support of my work, even when it takes time away from us being
together. I can't thank her enough for being there for me.
Also I would like to thank my parents for always believing in me,
even when no one else would, giving me the confidence to keep
going when otherwise I might have given up.
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This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by David Martone on 16th September 2009
710 South Avenue West, , Westfield, , 07090
About the Reviewers
Lesley A. Harrison has more than ten years experience working in the world of
IT, having served as a Systems Administrator for a multinational IT outsourcing
company, and later a database administrator for a British utility company. Today,
Lesley runs her own video gaming site, Myth-Games.com, and works as a freelance
web developer. She has clients all over the world, running a range of Joomla!,
WordPress, and other open source CMSes, as well as some custom-coded solutions.
Lesley is currently working on the Beginner's Guide to WordPress-MU, which will be
published by Packt Publishing in December 2009.
I would like to thank my husband, Mark, for keeping the flow of
coffee coming, and Moose, for many hours of fun.
Oland T. Whitecotton, III is a certified PHP and MySQL developer with over 8
years of experience. He has worked for the largest debt consolidation company in
America, Credit Solutions, as well as media publisher Idearc (think Superpages.
com) and the employment web site Monster.com.
Tom Canavan has been in the computer and IT industry for 24 years
and is currently working as the Chief Information Officer for a new Internet
Security Startup.
He is author of the Packt Publications book, Joomla! Web Security and the book
Dodging the Bullets - a disaster preparation Guide for Joomla! Websites.
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This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by David Martone on 16th September 2009
710 South Avenue West, , Westfield, , 07090
Download at WoWeBook.Com
This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by David Martone on 16th September 2009
710 South Avenue West, , Westfield, , 07090
Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: The Skills Required to Customize Joomla! 7
The architecture of the Internet 7
HTML 9
CSS 11
Server-side scripting and PHP 14
MVC programming and PHP 17
Client-side scripting and JavaScript 18
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) 19
JavaScript frameworks—Mootools and jQuery 20
Database work with MySQL and SQL 21
Summary 23
Chapter 2: Setting Up Our Environment 25
Types of tools 25
File transfers 26
Code editing 27
Image editing 28
Web browsing 29
Database administration 30
Storing code 31
Checkout 33
Update 33
Commit 33
Add 33
Delete 34
Revert 34
Ignore 34
Building locally 34
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Table of Contents
Practical—picking our tools 35
Practical—using our tools 36
Inspect Element 36
Summary 40
Chapter 3: Planning Our Site 41
Why is it so important to plan? 42
The Frankensite effect 42
No one can hit a target they don't have 43
How to plan 44
Mission 44
Practical—write our own mission statement 45
Monetization 46
Practical—decide our monetization model 47
Goals 48
Practical—set our goals 48
Licenses, encryption, and commercialism 51
Licenses 51
Open source 51
Proprietary 52
Encryption 52
Commercialism 53
Using the Joomla! Extensions Directory and Google 53
Choosing extensions from our goals 55
Practical—turning goals into extensions 56
Display audio and video 58
Submit pictures of customers' own house to a public gallery 58
Ask questions to each other and discuss topics 59
Grow an income from ad-supported free members and subscriptions 60
Customer comments on our articles 62
Ability to collect, moderate, and display user testimonials 63
Convert default web page URLs to human-readable links 63
Essential extensions 64
NinjaXplorer 65
JoomlaPack 65
JCE 65
EasySQL 66
Summary 66
Chapter 4: Installing and Configuring Extensions 67
Configuring Joomla! 67
Core extensions 68
Components 68
Modules 69
Plugins 70
[ ii ]
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710 South Avenue West, , Westfield, , 07090
Table of Contents
Global Configuration 70
Configuring content sections and categories 71
Clearing out the sample content 71
Creating sections 71
Creating categories 72
Configuring extensions 73
AEC 73
Subscription plans 74
Payment gateways 75
General Configuration 76
Customization 77
Micro Integrations 78
Authentication plugins 78
PayPal 78
Creating subscription plans 79
Joo!BB 80
Configuring boards 80
Overall Configuration of Joo!BB 82
!JoomlaComment 85
General 85
Security 85
Posting 86
Layout 86
Ninja Custom Gallery 87
Categories 87
Custom fields 88
sh404SEF 90
Other extensions 91
Summary 91
Chapter 5: Installing and Modifying Templates 93
Finding a template 93
Choosing a template 94
XHTML and CSS validation 95
Template structure 95
Extra features 95
Browser compatibility 95
Typography 96
Template performance 96
Installing a template 96
Modifying a template 97
Template images 97
Image considerations 97
Finding and modifying images 100
Modifying our sample site images 102
[ iii ]
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Table of Contents
Template PHP 107
Editing PHP files 107
Editing our sample site's PHP 107
Template CSS 108
Editing CSS files 109
Editing our sample site's CSS 109
Summary 113
Chapter 6: Customizing Modules 115
Module construction and operation 115
Module in a module 116
Module customization 117
Modifying top ten members 118
Step 1: Understanding the existing code 118
Step 2: Plan out our changes 127
Step 3: Make our changes 130
Step 4: Install and test our module 139
Summary 140
Chapter 7: Customizing Plugins 141
Plugin composition and operation 141
Plugin types 142
Authentication 142
Content 143
Editors 143
Editors-XTD 143
Search 143
System 143
User 144
XML-RPC 144
Plugin events 144
Plugin order 146
Customizing a Plugin 147
Step 1: Understand the existing code 148
en-GB.plg_content_njaccess.ini 149
njaccess.php 150
njaccess.xml 156
The rest? 158
Step 2: Plan out our changes 158
Step 2.1: Decide on our changes 158
Step 2.2: Mark out our changes 158
Step 3: Make our changes 163
Step 4: Install and test our Plugin 170
Summary 171
[ iv ]
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This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by David Martone on 16th September 2009
710 South Avenue West, , Westfield, , 07090
