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Template Design Book from Packt Publishing

Packt Publishing have released a fully detailed Joomla 1.5 Template Design Book titled "Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development - The Professional Guide to Programming Joomla!". Authors Chuck Lanham and James Kennard discuss in detail in the second edition how to Extend the power of Joomla! by adding components, modules, plugins, and other extensions.

This is the 2nd Edition of Mastering Joomla 1.5 Extension and Framework Development. It dives right into the inner workings of component, module and plugin extensions. Along with its explanations, it includes graphical representations of the layout structure of section as well as screenshots of settings screens or screen outcomes. It also goes on to explain each sub-section in great detail.

A breakdown of Chapters and Joomla elements covered

• Chapter 1, Introduction to Joomla! introduces the technology in general, covering the software framework that is the foundation for Joomla! 1.5, along with an overview of how it can be extended. It briefly discusses development tools that are readily available for use in developing Joomla! extensions.
• Chapter 2, Getting Started covers the basics of object oriented design as it applies to Joomla! The complete application process, from request to response is covered, a few core classes are introduced, and the basic Joomla! directory structure discussed.
• Chapter 3, The Database deals with the database. It talks about extending the database, conventions for the database schema, and common fields. Then the focus moves on tostoring data, common types of data in standard fields and dealing with multilingual requirements. We then cover querying the database and getting results. Next, the chapter explores how to manipulate common field types. The chapter concludes with a brief description of the JTable. The JTable is used to display and edit regular two-dimensional tables of cells. The JTable has many facilities that make it possible to customize its rendering and editing but provides defaults for these features so that simple tables can be set up easily.
• Chapter 4, Extension Design covers the basics in extension design. We begin with helper classes, then cover building and using getInstance() methods. We cover the registry along with saving and loading registry values. We explain the User, Session, Browser and Assets. We finish the chapter with a discussion on the structure of components, modules, and plugins and explain extension packaging and developing XML manifest fi les for each.
• Chapter 5, Component Design is about designing components. It starts with the structure and a basic design of a component using the MVC design pattern. Then we learn configuring the component and its various elements and parameters.
Chapter 6, Module Design covers designing modules. It explains standalone modules, module settings, frontend and backend modules, and modules and components working together. Then we talk about using templates.
• Chapter 7, Plugin Design deals with designing plugins. It initially deals with listeners/ observers and then the various plugin groups like authentication, content editors, search, and others. Then comes loading, translating, and using plugins as libraries. Finally it deals with, plugin settings.
• Chapter 8, Rendering Output explains ways to render output and how to maintain consistency throughout. It starts with the joomla.html library and then continues to describe how to build component HTML layouts. Then it discusses how to output the backend of a component. The chapter ends with the details of itemized data and pagination.
• Chapter 9, Customizing the Page deals with customizing the page. We cover things like modifying the document and translating, along with a brief explanation of using JavaScript effects from the Mootools library, which is included in Joomla!.
• Chapter 10, APIs and Web Services explores some of the Joomla! APIs, specifi cally in relation to web services. We also discuss some of the more common web services and take a more in-depth look at the Yahoo! Search API. The chapter inishes by describing how we can create our own web services using plugins.
• Chapter 11, Error Handling and Security provides an introduction to handling and throwing errors, warnings, and notices. Further, it talks about building secure Joomla! For More Information: www.PacktPub.com/ mastering-joomla-1-5-extension-framework- development-2e/book extensions. It also describes a number of common mistakes made when coding with Joomla! and explains how to avoid them.
• Chapter 12, Utilities and Useful Classes explains various utilities and useful classes like dates, arrays, tree structures, and others.

The authors go through examples of how to build up an extension by showing entire code snippets, and at the same time, explaining each section clearly and providing hints or tips to assist the reader so that they can avoid possible complications in the future. The Joomla! framework is also explained in detail. It expresses how you can use it and extend classes such as JObject in your own extensions. Other class libraries that are available to the Joomla! framework such as using html to pdf and RSS news feeds are also described.

After having read and used the 1st Edition extensively in the past, a first glance at the updated version has led me to discover more things that I did not pick up before and the deeper I read into this book, the more I discover about the capabilities and power of the Joomla framework.

For More Information on this Packt release and to purchase the book for yourself click here.

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