Sandbox

long time developer, I was thinking that Joomla was going to be yet another opensource server that I could install and start working with.. maybe have to weild some PHP magic and *boom*.. everything works perfect in a week. I'll even impress people more by taking a web page design and making it into a template.. *Wow*, *Ahh*, *Swoon*..

okay, 3 weeks later - I'm figuring out that I have stumbled onto something massive and complex, yet unbelievably cool. When did this whole CMS thing get so mature? I might as well have had the notion of installing SAP and having it running over the weekend.

I think what makes it more difficult for me is that I am coming into this anew when there seems to be a huge shift from 1.0 to 1.5.  So much of the documentation and guidance seems to be geared for 1.0; My first question is - how much trouble will I get myself into if I actually follow the developer documentation for 1.0 and try and implement it in 1.5?

The site that I am implementing will require some custom components and I really really need to get up to speed quickly since I am apart of a fast-paced track to production here and chose Joomla as the base technology to use.

I can't get over how advanced the development approach is.. I mean, we all herald MVC, but to use it with such rigor in 1.5 development philosophy is VERY inspiring.. well done.

What is the quickest way that someone with software engineering experience can get up to speed?

Much appreciated.

-Matthew

Hi Mathew and welcome.

You are perfectly correct in observing the lack of documentation for Joomla! 1.5 development.  If you are looking for API documentation, we have a very pretty but not always correct API reference available at http://api.joomla.org/.  As for getting up to speed, it can always be a trick but if you need to learn how to build a component I would suggest that you do your best to study and understand the available components.  Some make better examples than others, weblinks is a pretty good example in both the front-end and back-end.  Most of the front-end components are in the MVC pattern but not all of them are optimal or complete.  A good portion of the back-end components have not been refactored to utilize the MVC pattern yet so be weary of which ones you use as examples.  And of course, when you have specific questions, ask them and we will do our best to answer them.

Don't forget the API reference at dev.joomla.org on the wiki.  It is not as complete as api.joomla.org because it is hand generated, but there are roughly 80 or so classes documented (IIRC) with code examples of each method.

The best source for documentation is the developer wiki.  You want to look at http://dev.joomla.org/component/option,com_jd-wiki/Itemid,32/.  That is really the place to start at this stage of the game.

As for examples, good code to look at is the media manager, as it was refactored most recently to use MVC, and this was done to make it easier to fix and clean up.  In the backend, you can also look at com_menus.

People are generally pretty helpful here as well, so ask away!  I don't have a software engineering background, so I'm not always the best person to ask, but I have a fairly good grasp on the framework and can often tell you what code to look at to see how something works.

Ian