Easy Question, hopefully Topic is solved

[Daggeth]

Very new to Joomla, I'm liking the upgrade to 1.5 already though.

I'm trying to port my current site over to Joomla and am having a little trouble finding the best way to get some of my PHP/MySQL stuff working. This site offers trial licenses for an application and I when a user wants to get a license I need to first check to make sure he/she is eligible for it, then if so, I need to hit a remote server which generates the license and emails it out to that user.

My problem is not the coding aspect here, what I can't seem to figure out is whether I need to simply include this functionality in an article using a 3rd party plugin, create a module or create a plugin. Once I figure this out I'm sure I'll have questions on how best to access the code, but I think this is where I need to start first.

Thanks in advance for the help all, this seems like a great community here. I'm off to browse the forums some more!

[Rogue4ngel]

This is kind of nebulous question, and really is dependent on what you are trying to accomplish.

So the problem here, and most likely the reason for the lack of response is:

1. It's really not a coding question. This is the Coding forum.
2. What you're asking really is a matter of opinion. You can do it ALL of the ways mentioned.
3. Are you going to find a 3rd party extension, or write something yourself?

I'd suggest you take a look at the extension directory and see if anything fits the bill. If you're thinking of doing your own, this is a must read:

http://dev.joomla.org/component/option, ... Itemid,32/

Hope that gives you someplace to start.

[guitarhangar]

This site offers trial licenses for an application and I when a user wants to get a license I need to first check to make sure he/she is eligible for it, then if so, I need to hit a remote server which generates the license and emails it out to that user.

...what I can't seem to figure out is whether I need to simply include this functionality in an article using a 3rd party plugin, create a module or create a plugin.

This sounds highly specialized, so you are going to have to write your own component and module for it.

To clarify: all of the following are "plug-ins": components, modules, mambots. It's a catch-all term that refers to anything that modifies your website.

You will need to write both a component and a module, most likely, to offer this functionality to your website. A component is best viewed as a "tool set". In this case, the tool set's function will be "maintaining a database that will determine if a specific email address/user name /credit card is eligible or not eligible for a test license of one or more software programs". The tools would be "check database for eligibility tool" and "give license tool". Something along those lines. You'd then need to create a module that would be the user interface for both the administrative (back-end) and client-side( front-end) aspects of your website. So, you'd create an admin module for modifying how a license is awarded, the licenses to be awarded, etc, and a client module that would have fields for entering in their information and would return a test license.

You can look at the 1.5 Joomla Documentation to familiarize yourself with the API. Especially for 1.5, its pretty well written. Then post any future questions you have in this forum.