Joomla! Documentation™

This page has been archived. This page contains information for an unsupported Joomla! version or is no longer relevant. It exists only as a historical reference, it will not be improved and its content may be incomplete and/or contain broken links.

The aim of the API Reference Project is to construct a useful reference manual on the Joomla 1.5 (and later) Framework API which will complement, rather than replace, the automatically generated material on http://api.joomla.org. The starting point for the API Reference is the Framework page which lists all of the classes in the Framework API.

If you would like to help us with this massive project, then all you need to do is register on this wiki. You don't need to join a Working Group and you don't need to ask permission. You just register and get started. A good idea is to pick a class you know something about, or have spent time researching, and start there. Also feel free to add examples, improve explanations, or correct mistakes on existing pages.

We are only documenting the classes in the /libraries/joomla directory. These are the Joomla Framework classes. Some of the material developed on the wiki API Reference will gradually be merged into the phpDocumentor tags in the source code itself and hence will end up on http://api.joomla.org too.

Our inspiration is the online reference manual for PHP. For example, see this page: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.echo.php which can be accessed by a simple, clearly defined, standardised URL and which permits user comments to be added.

Guidance notes

The starting page for the API Reference is the Framework page (Joomla 1.6 Framwork | Joomla 1.5 Framework where you can see a complete list of all the classes in the API. Each class will be given its own wiki page linked to from the Framework page. Each class page includes a list of all the public methods available and each of those methods will also have its own page (actually a "sub-page").

To simplify the documentation process, the class and method pages have already been created automatically. We reduced the documentation process to three pieces of knowledge, only humans can provide:

• The writing of a comprehensive description of the class
• The collection of valuable links (further reading) for that class
• The provision of examples to put theory into practice

Sources of information that might be useful when writing for the API Reference:

• Current source code (of course). To find out how to get the latest source code, visit the Joomla! Developer Site.
• http://api.joomla.org.
• It can also be useful to search http://forum.joomla.org for further information and examples.