Joomla! Documentation™

This series, fabulous as it is, seems to have changed slightly, from "Developing an MVC component" to "Developing the HelloWorld component".

Particularly with the, very clever, use of categories within the component to identify greetings from areas within a general area, there is confusion, at least in my mind, about the use of categories for a component that someone else might write. Without these more general references to how it works and what is required, it is quite hard to work out what is essential (if anything can be said to be essential) and what is specific to the HelloWorld component.

Thoughts?

I think it's an important point you raise Mark, so maybe we should add a paragraph specifically about the use of categories to explain things. I believe that the use of language categories at the top level is best practice with Joomla, in that it makes a number of things a lot easier. For example, if instead of "helloworld" records you have "product" records and you want to translate the products into another language then you can use batch facilities to copy from one category to another, then go through and translate all the text of the records in the new language. Do you think that some explanation along these lines will address satisfactorily your point?

That is certainly one thing that would help. Another would be the indexing. It talks about needing to change the index to include the language, but it seems to me that's actually to do with the internal workings of the component, ie the classifying of greetings, rather than to do with Joomla's language implementation. Is that right?

OK, as far as I remember, that indexing change was really to align the tutorial component with the other main joomla components like com_content, because that's the way they work. Let me try and explain those aspects better and see what you think.