Cynergise - Social Media Consultancy by Chandesh Parekh » Joomla!

RokDownloads – great Joomla Component for File Download Management

Chandesh Parekh — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 17:28:54 +0000

Over the last few weeks I’ve gotten increasingly busy (hence the lull in articles on this site) in customising certain Joomla components at work.

One component I came across just last week is RokDownloads. This is a file-download management component for Joomla 1.5 and as the name suggests it rocks! Developed by the same team that create the brilliant templates for Joomla, RocketWerx (RocketTheme) I guess it’s not that much of a surprise what a quality component this is.

I was using a popular component called DOCman however when it came to customising, it proved pretty difficult mostly due to the fact that it had first been developed for Joomla 1.0x and the team that created it only ported it to work in Joomla 1.5 Legacy Mode; meaning basically that they hadn’t really used the MVC (Model, View, Controller) protocol the way it’s used for Joomla 1.5 Native components.

RokDownloads is proving much easier to customise and even if you don’t need any customisation it just works really well.

So, if you’re looking for a great, free file-download manager hit up RokDownloads.

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Joomla 1.0x Developers Manual

Chandesh Parekh — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:55:23 +0000

Although Joomla is a very popular open source application for building content-rich web sites, the available documentation for version 1.0x leaves a lot to be desired.

Currently working on a pretty big, and complicated, project involving multiple Joomla sites, I went off in search of relevant material that would help me design and build custom components and modules for version 1.015.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any single document that provided me with the information I needed, that is until I happened on a post on the Joomla Forum where someone had helpfully posted a link to a PDF of the Joomla Developers Manual.

Now, this guide for version 1.0x is incomplete, and will remain ever so since the Joomla Documentation Team are concentrating on getting a comprehensive Joomla 1.5 guide ready, however it does offer a lot of important information that you’ll only otherwise get by spending hours on the Joomla Forum and on other sites trying out tutorials.

So, if you’re looking for a ,somewhat, single document in PDF format that can help you understand the Joomla CMS engine a little better and help in building your own components and modules, look no further – click here to download the Joomla Developers Manual.

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Joomla – the difference between components and modules

Chandesh Parekh — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 07:12:49 +0000

When starting out in Joomla, either as a developer or site administrator, it’s likely one of the first questions to pop up will be what the difference between a Component and a Module is. Although it’s possible to ‘figure’ out what does what, it’s always a good idea to get the low-down from someone who’s experienced in Joomla development.

Joseph LeBlanc has a great article on his site making it very simple to understand the main differences…

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Joomla 1.5 or Joomla 1.015 – which version is better to use?

Chandesh Parekh — Thu, 29 May 2008 07:00:56 +0000

What version to use for a Joomla project is a question that requires some thought, primarily regarding the functionality you want your Joomla site to have.

Joomla 1.0x has been around since about April 2004, with the latest version 1.015 released on 22nd February 2008, and because of this it has a large number of extensions available to quickly add functionality to your Joomla site. The time has allowed the extensions to mature so that most versions will work as expected and can be tweaked to your particular needs without much to worry about.
The other advantage is that more likely than not what you may want to do with a particular extension will probably have been done by someone else with their trials and tribulations of the process recorded on one of the numerous Joomla forums.
This saves a lot of time and effort when implementing your processes, the very reason you’re probably using a framework like Joomla in the first place!

Joomla 1.5 Stable (Khepri) was released on 22nd January 2008 after a number of months in beta testing, and so it is really only a few months ‘old’. Although many Joomla-extension developers have made their v1.0x version extensions available to use in v1.5, I’ve found them to be a hit or miss affair, never really knowing which extension will actually work as expected.

A current project I’m working on requires a lot of functionality, most of it already available using existing extensions, and some of it will require custom extensions. The decision was made to downgrade to Joomla 1.015 so we could utilise existing extensions and find enough guidance and help, primarily through the use of forums, when it came to developing the custom extensions. The idea is to wait for Joomla 1.5 to mature a little before we make the move to the new codebase.

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