I'm quite new to joomla programming. I'm supposed to make a form together with coninciding database table. As of the moment, I'm quite confused on the things that I should take a look at.
What should be the first thing that I look at? Should I look at the components concept? I come from a Java background so this is still quite confusing for me. I've already seen several forms extensions for joomla, however, i'd like to be able to create my own form from scratch.
What are the first things I should look at? Would appreciate it if you can give me pointers.
Thanks
Depending on the size of the form I would use a module rather than a component if it's going to be fairly simple. To get you started off with a module, you can use the Module Generator. Make sure you set "Helper File" to "Yes".
Ok basically, lets say your module is called "Test Form".
You are going to have 3 main files:
helper.php - This file will include all your functions
mod_testform.php - This will contain things such as calling some functions if need be, defining parameters, adding in custom CSS and
JS etc. Bascially a controller.
default.php - This is for the html of the form. It can also be used to import css and javascript files. Obviously PHP is allowed but I would refrain from adding functions in here.
Also have a look at the following page:
http://www.techguywebsolutions.com/create-a-custom-joomla-2.5-module.html
Hope this helps.
Related
So we got a great project and we absolutely have to learn Typo3 or Drupal for it quickly. I already know some basic things.
I did the installation correctly for both, I know how to set up a basic Site using Fluid Template in Typo3 and I know how to set up a basic template in drupal without any styles.
My Problem now is how do I style a website since typo3 or drupal doesn't have a field for classes (The fields just get some random ids) and also how can I build a website with multiple sections where I have to style each section individually.
If you have any links to good tutorials or anything else that explains what I need to know I would appreciate it.
First of all, i think you understand HTML/CSS and know that TYPO3,... are content management systems. They're wrapping your content (saved to the database) with a template like HTML Files to send the result to the browser as a full rendered website.
ThomasLöffler already gave you the hint to read the documentation on both websites to make your choice which one you want to use. I prefer TYPO3, but the start many years ago wasn't easy. So i could you explain a little bit, and on a very short way what you need to do... After all please read the docs on typo3.org (Gettin started guide or something)
In TYPO3 you need to include and build your HTML Template. Prefered with the FLUID Template Engine / Framework. After that you need to set it with the TYPO3 TypoScript as your main template.
The content templates like will be rendered by the TYPO3 Extension "fluid_styled_content". This extension has also fluid templates to render the content object into a html output. Before you have enough knowledge about typo3 it's not recomended to change them.
The main thing is, that you need to include a stylesheet (css) file in your site. In TYPO3's TypoScript it's for example like this:
page.includeCSS.file100 = path/to/your/css/mystyle.css
Thats the very short overview and very little explanation what to do. But as Thomas said, you need to understand both and decide for one of them. And of course you need to read the docs first a little bit, before you ask. That would help you and each of us, to give you better answers. Good luck!
TYPO3 Gett started:
https://docs.typo3.org/typo3cms/GettingStartedTutorial/Introduction/Index.html
You can learn a lot of things if you take a look into the code of the official introduction package (https://extensions.typo3.org/extension/introduction/) The package can simply installed over the extension manager -> get preconfigured distributions
Or you just use it as a basis to build your own layout. You do not have to reinvent the wheel ;)
I am doing some freelance work for a client and I need to re-code an old menu. The entire site is static which will make this process extremely slow and redundant, does anyone have a good technique for updating multiple pages automatically?
The old developer used "Allwebmenus" which is a automatic menu creation tool. It is implemented by using JavaScript which writes HTML to the DOM. I'm going to replace this with a clean html menu and some simple jQuery.
Right now I think the best way is to create a separate .html file with the menu code, and use PHP includes on all the pages but this still requires me to update every page on the site. Can anyone give me better idea? Or do you think this is the best option?
Thanks for the help!
create menu.php and include("menu.php") into each file where the old menu's are written.
It will make your life easier going forward too.
As far as fixing all the static pages, you will have to go in and do that yourself.
include("menu.html");
You can use includes, but it might also make since to put them onto a CMS like Drupal. Handles a lot of that for you.
Using the PHP includes is a good method. If the "Allwebmenus" has Javascript code on each page, you'll have to edit each file anyways, so adding the includes is no big deal.
I'm creating my own CMS from scratch as a way to build my php and mysql skills. Everything is going well, but I'm at the point where I want to create individual post pages for each blog post I write. So the index.php page has a list of all my blogs with snippets of each post and there is a read more button that should take the user to the full page for each blog post. Each post has a url created from the blog title entered in the "create post" form. I'm trying to figure out how to create unique pages for each post without passing the title, subhead, post content and other info through the GET.
This also dovetails with another feature I'm trying to add. I want to be able to create individual pages using a "create page" form like I did for my posts. So if I want an "about us" page I go to my admin form, fill out the title, add the content, and when I hit submit it creates the page dynamically. I have thought all day about how I'd do these two things but can't quite figure out how I can do this.
FYI, I'm not asking for code, I just need a push in the right direction as I try to conceptualize how to achieve this. Thanks!
If you're not familiar with the Model-View-Controller pattern, reading up on it might be prudent. MVC is frequently the right starting place for high-level design of web applications.
Also, a CMS is a big enough project you should consider using a PHP framework like CodeIgniter, Symfony, Zend, etc. to make your life easier. It removes a lot of the drudge work and common tasks.
Dynamic Page Creation and Display
I think you want to split it into two things: the text content (basically what you put in the forms) and the HTML templating surrounding that content.
When you make a page or blog post, you would want to store the actual content (what you type into the creation form) in a database of some sort (not necessarily an RDBMS, but if you're trying to build MySQL skills it's a reasonable choice).
Then you would use a separate function to bind that content into an HTML template and present it to the user when they load a given page.
URL Routing
To get nicer-looking URLs you can use something like apache's mod_rewrite. You can use that to convert a URL like this:
posts/how-to-make-a-cms
to this:
posts.php?title=how-to-make-a-cms
Then you can have posts.php read from GET as normal. How you choose to do the conversion is pretty open-ended.
To avoid getting really complicated rewrites, people often just structure everything to go to a central routing script which figures out what class and method to call and what arguments to pass it. So it would rewrite the URL above to:
main.php?a=posts/how-to-make-a-cms
Then main.php would parse out the segments of that argument from GET and figure out where to send them. Like it might take posts/show/how-to-make-a-cms and do something like:
$o = new Posts();
$o->show("how-to-make-a-cms");
If you do it that way, I think you can avoid mod_rewrite entirely as long as you're willing to accept only slightly pretty URLs, like this:
mysite.com/main.php?/posts/show/how-to-make-a-cms
I haven't done this type of thing before (because the frameworks do it so beautifully already), so I might be missing some minor details.
You should watch some tutorials from phpacademy.org or thenewboston.org, they have best and most valuable tutorials ever made about PHP.
I think you may try to start from that course/playlist:
phpacademy.org: PHP Tutorials: Creating a Blog
If you don't understand everything, watch this:
thenewboston.org: Official Beginner PHP Tutorials Playlist!
If you have no problems with PHP itself you may try to use some simple framework with MVC support. That helps A LOT in variable handling between pages, makes work with database easier etc.
phpacademy.org: Introduction to CodeIgniter
phpacademy.org: Introduction to CodeIgniter - Basic Website
I had the same problem. You can easily do this by using the fopen function. Here is a link to a tutorial: http://www.tizag.com/phpT/filecreate.php
<?php
function wwwcopy($link,$file)
{
$fp = #fopen($link,"r");
while(!feof($fp))
{
$cont.= fread($fp,1024);
}
fclose($fp);
$fp2 = #fopen($file,"w");
fwrite($fp2,$cont);
fclose($fp2);
}
//Example on using this function
wwwcopy("http://www.domain.com/list.php?member=sample", "sample.html");
//Another example
wwwcopy("http://www.domain.com/list.php?member=sample2", "sample2.html");
?>
As a small part of a university project I'm working on (custom MVC based project management system), I need to develop a template engine. I don't wish to use an off the self system such as Smarty because I've written every other part of the project myself and don't want to go back on that now.
Anyway, I've managed to code something simple so far, I have a class, create an instance of it, add some data to the instance, then pass in a template file. The file has a series of tags like {this} when then get replaced with the data. Simple.
The issue I'm having is when it comes to looping things - i.e. a table of users or a list of categories. At the moment I have a template file for the page (users.html) which contains the opening and closing tags, with a template tag between them called {users}. I then have another template file (users-detail.html) which displays a table row with the user info in. I'm creating a new instance of the users-detail.html template, adding the data, parsing it, then placing the output (string of HTML) into an array. I then loop this array, attach all the strings together, then assign this to the {users} tag in the users.html template file.
As you can probably tell from that explanation it is a bit of a bodge, and there are probably better methods out there for doing what I'm trying to achieve. Ideally I want to avoid using PHP in the template files if possible, and I often need to have multiple loops within one template file.
If anyone has any tips / advice on how I can achieve this, or any tutorials I could follow to get some inspiration that would be much appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
I've seen that approach before (including another template for the insides of loops). I used to work on an old version of vbulletin which does (or did) this. It makes things annoyingly complicated because you can't just add a loop to a template - without setting up a whole new template for each layer of looping.
I'd advise you instead to go along the route of Smarty.
Classically, this statement:
I don't wish to use an off the self system such as Smarty because I've written every other part of the project myself and don't want to go back on that now.
... indicates you really should just be using Smarty. In the real world that would be a poor justification for re-implementing something yourself. But I am like you, and I understand that you want to implement something yourself (because you want to learn, you find it fun, you are a perfectionist, etc). As long as you do it on your own time and it's a personal project, go for it.
It would be worth studying Smarty to see how it works (not just the syntax but how it compiles templates, stores the compiled version etc). Are you comfortable writing a tokeniser/parser in PHP which can compile your template language and output PHP? If you are advanced enough to do it, do it. At the very simplest, you read in a tag like {foreach from=$something} and somehow translate it to <?php foreach ($something as $thing) { ?>. You check token types, etc to make sure the template tag is valid, and so on.
The title may have sounded a little vague, but I did not know how to articulate the question.
I want to create a webpage that will contain links to other webpages. But, I want to make it a little modular and want to write all of the functions in one page and access it from the php script(webpage) that contains the part about displaying contents.
In short, I want to create a php page exclusively for displaying contents, and another for running the background functions.
Also, I have a LAMP architecture, and I just have the index.html page to begin with. How do I make it redirect to a php page?
First of all you should start exploring HTML, then Javascript, then PHP, then AJAX.
Take one by one, using books, using other script sources, usign stackoverflow.com to get answers.
I learned all those steps in that order just by reading other peaople sources, exploring and testing then on my own.
Basic HTML is pretty simple if you know how is works.
Learn what can you do with javascript, of course, if you need it.
Your best friend for php is php.net as it will always answer most of the questions
These days javascript frameworks like jQuery simply tells you step by step how to do what you need.
Assuming your LAMP stack is correctly configured, you just need to rename your index.html to index.php.
Then start reading the manual! (I know that sounds unhelpful, but that's where I started and it's the best way for me to learn).
http://www.php.net/manual/en/index.php
Simply rename your index.html to index.php and it should work.
tizag.com (excellent beginner tutorials)
php.net – Contains the PHP manual, user-contributed examples and other
documentation related to PHP.
phpfreaks.com (tutorials)
I ran two PHP workshops in 091 labs and made very trimmed down example apps. Slides and code here: http://091labs.com/wiki/?id=introduction_to_php
Edit: There's an error in the slides for week 1 there, the zend_extension line on setting up xdebug should have a .dll after php_xdebug
I see you already have a project in mind. Programming is best learned with a project rather than focusing on learning by reading alone, so stick with that.
What you described is essentially the Model-View-Controller paradigm used by most web application frameworks. MVC is designed to separate business logic from presentation.
I can't really give you a more specific answer since your question is very vague, but the simplest, most stripped-down way to accomplish MVC is to have two php files, one accessible from the outside, which then includes another file in a protected directory.
So for example you can have a functions.php file and then in your index.php file
require_once('lib/functions.php');
//call functions defined in functions.php
Aside from that, I think you just need to read up a bit and experiment on your own.
If you are starting PHP from scratch and you have LAMP up and running I would advise making a MySQL table with a bunch of strings that represent links to other pages.
I would then attempt to write an index.php page that can access this table and loop through the table displaying the links.
This is probably the easiest non trivial example of using PHP. Remember your page will need to be called index.php not index.html. Place the file in the same folder as your index.html for now.
Good luck!
I would suggest checking out lynda.com It's worth the money and it is a very good introduction to PHP/MySql