Joomla! Tutorial #2: Joomla! Extensions

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Joomla! Tutorial #2
Joomla! Extensions
Things That You Need to Know

By Muhammad Syafiq for http://forum.codecall.net.

Because Open Source Matter…

Joomla! is a very rich in application for Content Management System. This part of tutorial will introduce to you one of the Joomla! main core. It’s very important to know this so you know what type of website that you going to make later.

As you see, Joomla! consists of various extension of plugins, components, modules, languages and templates. You can see this by pointing to ‘Extension > Install/Uninstall manager’ from the admin page.
Extensions:



1. Components
Components is the main core of Joomla!. It’s the advanced and complex extension inside. Joomla!. It’s like an application inside an OS. When there is a request to the Joomla! powered website, these component will render the specified main page. Components are the major portion of your page as it is driven by a menu item and every menu item runs a component.
If you installing a component, you also probably installing module. (From admin page point to Component on the top menu)

2. Modules
Modules are simple plugin that render page. It’s like component extensions but it’s not complex. It can be as simple as HTML. However, modules have a limit functionality like modify the data on the fly interactively. (From the admin page point to Extension > Module Manager)



3. Languages
It consist key/value pairs that help the translation of static text string inside Joomla! source code.
(From the admin page point to Extension > Language Manager)

4. Plugins
Also known as mambots, these extension will handle every event that was triggered by other extensions that was registered to. Most likely, you will ignore this most of the time. (From the admin page point to Extension > Plugin Manager)

5. Templates
Simple extension. Template is easy to build and it will help a lot in customizing the website.
(From the admin page point to Extension > Template Manager)

This is the basic thing that you should know inside Joomla!. Next time, we will do some styling to the website.

Summary
Component: mini-application to render the main page body
Module: renders small html blocks on any page
Plugin: changes code behavior dynamically (renamed from mambot)
Language: provides language translation