Packt Publishing is giving away a free copy of Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development by Chuck Lanham and James Kennard. Entering only takes a few seconds, since all you’ve got to do is leave a comment.

About the Book

Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development is your guide to learn about the framework and the different libraries of Joomla! 1.5 and how to extend it. It offers the tools you're going to need to facilitate the development process.

At the beginning it introduces the object oriented design and the different design patterns to build a clean, maintainable and secure extension. Then it moves to the core classes of Joomla! and explains "How Joomla! Work" What are the processes happening before you see an output. That's an essential part to understand how to build your extension.

Chapter seven explains the basics of building an extension. How the directory should be structured, what are the basic files to start with and how to setup your extensions sandbox. In later chapters it goes through how to work with database and how to store & manibulate data. There're three different chapters for the different types of  extensions : 

• Component ( the MVC pattern, building frontend/backend, helpers, routing)
• Module ( standalone modules, working with components, helpers, layout)
• Plugin ( different types of plugins, the listeners/observers)

The recent Joomla update included a MooTools upgrade plugin to load version 1.2.4 of the framework. On this tutorial we're going to build a simple drop down menu without using any modules. We will use a menu class from MooDropMenu that can create an unlimited nested menu, built by the HTML tags ul and li.

Preparing the Moo!

Go to the plugin manager and enable the MooTools upgrade plugin.

Ian Maclennan announced on Joomla! Bug Squad Google group that Joomla! 1.5.19 will be ready tomorrow and it will include an upgrade plugin to move from MooTools 1.1 to 1.2

Administrators will be able to choose weather to upgrade MooTools or not. At the moment most of the extensions developed are based on the old version of MooTools. If you're willing to continue supporting 1.5 you should start migrating your extensions to the new version. Lastly we should thank the Bug Squad team for their amazing work!

Searching and replacing text in your database is easy using the SQL command:

     UPDATE table SET field = REPLACE (field,'pattern','whatever');

I've always used this command to remove styles and colors inserted into the contents by the WYSIWYG editors by my clients. You can execute this command through phpMyAdmin from your hosting panel or if you're stuck without it you can always use one of the database management tool for Joomla! Art Adminer is great and it will let you access other databases on the same server too!

I recently got the chance to read this new book released by Packtpub on March this year. I would really love to share a few thoughts with you about this book.

Joomla! 1.5 Beginner's Guide takes you to a journey to learn by doing. Through this book you will learn how to build a realistic example website step-by-step. Instead of just learning about Joomla!'s capabilities in general terms, you'll meet real-world web building challenges!

The book is written in an easy language covering almost everything you need to know to build a fully fledged Joomla! powered website. In Twelve chapters you will learn how to install, build, maintain and extend your website.

I've seen some books about Joomla! that never talk about extensions! Or they just mention a few words about the difference between its types. This one is different; there's a chapter talking about the popular extensions and how do you get the most out of the Extensions Directory.

There's a great chapter about templates. Almost the very first question a new Joomla! user ask after installations is "OK, where do we get those good looking designs I've seen!?" The author lists some important references for websites that offer free templates. It also explain the basics of template tweaking and how to change your template with CSS. Don't worry you don't have to be a CSS-Ninja to do that! Some basic knowledge of CSS would be enough. At the end of this chapter the author include a few valuable resources for blogs and tutorials explaining how to create your template from the scratch.