Wrox- Professional Joomla

At the heart of every Web site project is the need to organize and present content. For the last 10 years, static sites have dominated the Internet landscape, and site maintenance has been a laborious and often frustrating process. Web masters had to cope with thousands of line of HTML code across a mass of Web
page files. However, employing a dynamic site required a large amount of custom coding and potential unforeseen security loopholes.

The release of the Joomla content management system (CMS) in 2005 opened a new age of affordable, advanced Web site deployment. Content management was now possible without any programming required, yet the flexibility of the Joomla system allowed the creation of robust add-ons to augment the CMS. As tens of thousands of developers flocked to Joomla and the availability of add-ons reached critical mass (almost 1700 at last count), Joomla became the most important noncommercial CMS in
the world. It has become a major force in allowing Web masters to perform site deployment and management without the grueling effort.

This widespread adoption has opened numerous opportunities for professional Joomla developers. With the number of downloads of the Joomla system having surpassed 2.5 million by mid-2007, developers can find a ready audience for their work. Whether you’re creating an XHTML-compliant template to sell to a subscription site, providing expert Joomla consulting services, or releasing a Joomla extension into the open source community for widespread adoption, there is a place for you in the wide world of Joomla. With the diverse needs of professional readers in mind, I wrote this book with the intention that you would turn the last page with an understanding of Joomla second only to full-time developers or the Joomla development team members. Between these covers, I have tried to provide examples of the two main areas of the professional Joomla field: development and deployment.

For development, there are chapters focusing on implementing custom templates, creating all three types of Joomla extensions (modules, components, and plug-ins), utilizing cutting-edge Ajax technology in Joomla add-ons, using a professional development environment with source code control, adopting design patterns for best programming methods, and much more.

You will even be delving into the internal structure of the Joomla framework itself to give you a complete behind-the-scenes education. Learning the fundamentals of the Joomla structure will allow you to better develop add-ons that better take advantage of the riches that Joomla offers. For deployment, you’ll examine the underlying technologies (PHP, Apache, and so on) that can be tuned to offer the best system performance. General administration, search engine optimization (SEO), interfacing
with outside content, security configuration, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) authentication setup—all of the topics are covered.

I hope you come away from this book with many ideas for modifying and extending Joomla to meet the needs of yourself and/or your customers. I’ve spent dozens of hours digging into the underlying code of the Joomla framework and have come away with a vast appreciation of the brilliant work done by the Joomla team. I suspect that the more you work with Joomla, the more you’ll share my admiration for this open source wonder.