You’ve seen it before: the monster Joomla installation package. It’s a giant component, several side modules, and at least one plugin. Once you dig through the code, you notice the plugin isn’t even responding to events: it’s merely there to load up code shared by the other extensions.

Fortunately, Joomla 1.6 and higher provide a better way of handling this. Reusable code libraries can now be installed into the libraries folder without creating extraneous plugins. Just like any other extension in Joomla, a library is packaged as a .zip file with an XML manifest to guide the installation.

If you’ve created Joomla XML manifest files before, creating one for a library is straightforward. The main thing you need to keep in mind is the added <libraryname> element. This element is the “system name” for the library: make sure it is valid as a directory name across platforms. When coming up with this “system name,” avoid spaces, capital letters, and special characters. Upon installation, Joomla will create a subfolder of libraries using name specified by <libraryname>. Contrast this with the <name> element, which identifies an extension with a human readable name.

As you may know, you can set your Joomla site "offline" by setting "Site Offline" to "Yes" in the Global Configuration. This is a great feature that enables you to build or troubleshoot your site in offline mode, restricting access only to backend users who login through the login form displayed on the offline page.

The only limitation to this feature is that you have to be logged in to see the frontend of the site, so you cannot test the site from the perspective of a user who is not logged in. For example, if you want to test registration, AEC or Ambra Subscriptions integration, or any number of other things that might require you to see the site from the perspective of a non-logged-in user, you cannot do that because offline mode requires you to log in to see the front end of the site.

I have developed a Joomla plugin called Offline Override that enables you to put the site in offline mode, and enter a keyword to override offline mode without requiring a login. You simply install and enable the Offline Override plugin, create your secret keyword (no spaces) and enter it in the plugin's parameters. Then, when your site is in offline mode, you can override the offline mode by adding "?keyword=VALUE" in the address bar for the frontend of your site. For example, if your keyword is "joomlarocks", you would go to http://yoursite.com/?keyword=joomlarocks. The override only lasts the length of your session and you must re-enter the keyword in the address bar (http://yoursite.com/?keyword=joomlarocks) the next time you open your browser.

JForm is one of the most exciting new features to be introduced as part of Joomla! 1.6. The intention is to provide XML configurable forms complete with custom field types and form validation. I cannot stress enough just how much easier this is going to make life as a Joomla! developer. In this article we take a look at how to define JForms and how to display them.

If you’ve ever worked on an existing website, chances are you’ve run into a directory listing like the following:

Copy of index.html
about.html
contact.html
favicon.ico
index.html
index.html.bak
index.html.bak2
index.html.old
pricing.html

It’s also quite possible you are responsible for having created a mess like this. We’re always told to make backups of our files, and so we make them, often right next to the files of a live site. While it’s a good idea to make a backup of your code before changing something that already works, .bak, .old, and .other files can accumulate very quickly.

Made-up extensions like .bak tell us (let alone others) very little about the significance of each change. It would be nice if there were some way of keeping a history of every change made to a file. Better still, tracking who made each change would be useful. And a way of combining changes from two different copies of the same file would be fantastic.

Fortunately, such systems already exist.

I've heard a lot of talk lately about whether or not Joomla can handle large-scale websites, or if it's best used for small mom-and-pop sites. I can say emphatically that the answer to that question is that Joomla is not only useful for small mom-and-pop sites, but it can also be used to build it medium and large-scale sites. There are a few popular examples of large-scale websites built with Joomla, and two developers have been involved in a number of these sites: Mitch Pirtle from Space Monkey Labs and Fotis Evangelou from Komrade and JoomlaWorks. In this 2-part series, I am interviewing both Mitch and Fotis to get their insights on what it takes to deploy large-scale websites with Joomla. Part 1 is my interview with Mitch.