Archived:Developing a MVC Component/Introduction

This page has been archived.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 It exists only as a historical reference, it will not be improved and its content may be incomplete and/or contain broken links.

Articles in this Series

1. Introduction
2. Developing a Basic Component
3. Adding a view to the site part
4. Adding a menu type to the site part
5. Adding a model to the site part
6. Adding a variable request in the menu type
7. Using the database
8. Basic backend
9. Adding language management
10. Adding backend actions
11. Adding decorations to the backend
12. Adding verifications
13. Adding categories
14. Adding configuration
15. Adding ACL
16. Adding an install/uninstall/update script file
17. Using the language filter facility
18. Adding an update server
19. Example of a Frontend Update Function
20. Example of Menu Parameters & Stylesheets

This is a multi-part tutorial on how to develop a Model-View-Contoller Component for Joomla! 2.5. You can find the other parts of this tutorial on each page in the right sidebar under "Articles in this Series".

Read the Introduction or Skip to the first part of this tutorial.

Requirements

You need Joomla! 2.5 (with PHP, MySQL, Apache and Microsoft II) or greater for this tutorial.

It will help you much if you are running an local instance of Joomla on your computer. Then backup librarys map tree and put in your own debug code there. Very much tracing can be done in controller and view code. You can put a lot of 'error_log(...)' and you can also combine it with 'print_r(debug_backtrace(),true)' to get a better understanding of what really happens behind the surface. You will be able to follow your programs steps in apache's error log.

Introduction

Joomla! 2.5 is constructed using three different applications:

• installation (used for installing Joomla)
• administrator (used for managing content)
• public (used for displaying content)

The installation application is used once. The administrator and public are used through the concept of components. Each component has two entry points:

• one is located in the components directory (it is used for displaying content)
• one is located in the administrator/components directory (it is used for managing content)

Both are called com_componentname/componentname.php (the com_ prefix is a historical trace)

Contributors

• Christophe Demko