Bobby Jack

I inherited a Joomla 1.5 site a few months ago, so I was in a similar situation to you – where to begin, with lots of questions about Joomla, its ethos, etc. What I’ve learnt in the meantime is:

• Joomla is very heavily dependent on 3rd-party extensions. Some of these are good, some not so good – evaluation and caution is advised.
• Joomla encourages the use of extensions, even for relatively static content. Whether these are full blown ‘components’, or ‘modules’, depends on quite how powerful/flexible they need to be.
• The MVC architecture that underlies everything has its positives and negatives. On the plus side, if everything is done consistently, there is a good separation of concerns and – in particular – the template system offers good configurability. On the downside, very simple components/modules have an awful lot of complexity – e.g. just in terms of number of files.
• Joomla is open-source … sort of. If your familar with the open-source community, you might be a bit disappointed with Joomla, especially when it comes to 3rd-party extensions. Many of them do not embrace the open source ethos, and try to sell code and/or support so, to reiterate, choose your extensions carefully.
• Writing your own extension is fairly simple, especially if you’re familiar with PHP. Although the documentation isn’t great, there are some gems – in particular, take a look at:
  • http://docs.joomla.org/Developing_a_Model-View-Controller_Component_-_Part_1
  • http://docs.joomla.org/Accessing_the_database_using_JDatabase
• When it comes to forms, I’m still undecided. The site I’ve inherited uses a third-party extension to manage them (mod_breezingforms), but it has its issues. If you have the luxury of trying out several alternatives, take it.
• Run your development site in debug mode. Take a look at database queries. In my own experience, Joomla is very, very demanding on the database. For example, I have some pages that make hundreds of calls to the database with every request. Watch out for this.
• At some point, you’ll see itemid in the URL and wonder what on earth it is. It refers to a menu item. Menus in Joomla are a bit more general than you might think – they don’t necessarily represent a ‘menu’ and they’re quite important. For example, the built-in way to include content on a series of pages is for them to belong to the same menu item, so you might need to create ‘fake’ menus to house content.