Packt - Publishing Mastering Joomla 1.5 Extension and Framework Development

This book will guide you through the complexities of implementing components, modules, and plugins in Joomla! 1.5. It provides useful reference material that explains many of the advanced design features and classes available in Joomla! 1.5.

Joomla! is one of the world's top open-source content management systems. The main sources of the PHP MySQL application's success are its comprehensive extension libraries, which extend Joomla! far beyond content management, and its very active forums where one can easily tap into the knowledge of other Joomla! users, administrators, and developers.

The architecture of the latest version of Joomla! differs in many ways from previous versions. Resultantly backward-compatibility with some extensions has been broken; the race is on for developers to update their skills in order to rectify the problems and start building new extensions. Perhaps the most important of the changes is the  reorganization and classification of files and classes. This change encourages but does not force developers to use the Joomla! libraries consistently between extensions.