Writing Joomla Components
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The biggest advantage of an open-source system like Joomla is that it's supported by thousands of developers writing Joomla components and extensions. Publishers are able to add all sorts of goodies to their basic Joomla, making it easy to manage their site and deliver their content in exactly the way they want.
But despite the huge range of extensions, sometimes you just can't find
the component that's contains the precise solution you need.
When that happens, the best solution is to write the component yourself.
Fortunately, writing Joomla components isn't that difficult. There are two approaches.
The first is simply to hack an existing component. Find a component
that's close to what you would like it to do, copy it to a directory
and start making changes. You'll probably find it useful to cut out any
code you don't want and understand which sub-system manages the admin
side and which the user side.
Writing a Joomla component in this way though requires an understanding
of code. If you don't have that, the only way to make your own Joomla extensions is to dive in to coding.
Joomla's own help pages offer a pretty good introduction to making a component from scratch. It will
explain how to create a simple task handler and output file. It's not all-encompassing, but it's a good place to start.
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