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How to Develop a Custom Joomla Module?
We have spoken and wrote about many articles on Joomla and its importance on website development. Now for better understanding of Joomla, here we present an article on How to develop a custom Joomla Module. For better introduction, we can take an image slider module creation that we had developed as an example.
The basic form of Joomla 1.5 consist of two files:
XML file
PHP file
XML file has general information about the module as shown in administration Interface of Joomla module manager and also module parameters that helps to modify the appearance/functionality of the module. The PHP file affords controlling logic to the module as per our requirement.
The Basic files required to create a Joomla custom (Image Slider) module are given below
• index.html
• module_name.xml (Eg. mod_simpleslider.xml )
• module_name.php (Eg. mod_simpleslider.php)
Note: It is very important, that XML file name must matches module name. Otherwise, installer will install the module, but Joomla wouldn’t show parameters and additional information stored in XML.
Index file format:
index.html
This helps to ensure that a default page is displayed without listing all of the other files in the directory incase of unauthorized users attempted to access the directory. It’s not necessary, but a good practice.
| <html><body background=”#fff”></body></html> |
XML file format:
mod_simpleslider.xml
| <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?> <install type=”module” version=”1.5.0″> // Name of the Module <name>SimpleSlider Module</name> // Name of the Author <author>treeshore.com</author> //Version Month & year of the Module <creationDate>December 2011</creationDate> //Copyright information <copyright>All rights reserved to TreeShore.com.</copyright> //License Information <license>GPL 2.0</license> //Author’s email address <authorEmail>[email protected]</authorEmail> // Author’s website <authorUrl>www.treeshore.com</authorUrl> //Module version number <version>1.0.0</version> //Description of what the module does <description>SimpleSlider – This module will show image slideshow created with Simpleslider</description> // Listing of all files that should be installed for the module to function – in our case the file structure will be… <files> <filename module=”mod_simpleslider”>mod_simpleslider.php</filename> <filename>index.html</filename> <folder>tmpl/</folder> <folder>engine/</folder> <folder>data/</folder> </files> //Optional parameters <params> </params> //in our case <params group=”advanced”> <param name=”cache” type=”list” default=”1″ label=”Caching” description=”Select whether to cache the content of this module”> <option value=”1″>Use global</option> <option value=”0″>No caching</option> </param> <param name=”cache_time” type=”text” default=”900″ label=”Cache Time” description=”The time before the module is recached” /> </params> </install> |
The Installer copy and install the files as defined by the above xml file. Notice that we DO NOT include a reference in the files section for the XML file.
PHP File Format
mod_simpleslider.php:
The basic structure of a module PHP file format will be looks like the following:
| <?php
//don’t allow other scripts to grab and execute our file <?phpaddStyleSheet(JURI::base() . ‘modules/mod_’.$module->name.’/engine/style.css’); |
When the above mod_simpleslider.php file is loaded in Joomla by means of PHP include directive it retrieves the stylesheet & javascript files from its source directory and produces the slider output to the final page.
To package this module for distribution and installation, simply zip the files together: Eg. mod_simpleslider.zip.
The resulting mod_simpleslider.zip file may be uploaded and installed through the standard Joomla! 1.5 Extension Manager.
Brand Promotion a vital mechanism to inspire customers
Brand is an identification characteristic that influences or enlightens the products or services by building loyalty and trust in the midst of the prospective clients. The steps to build successful brands are Brand Management and Brand Promotion.
Brand Management
It is a process employed to control all the aspects that stimulate the customer insight such as pricing, features, experience, performance, customer service etc. with reference to a brand. Such a brand management process needs detailed brand research on various components such as name, logo, slogan or tagline, corporate identity, target market etc. to generate Brand Positioning. The above said components are categorized into three namely:
Brand Identity is a method of making audience acknowledge about a brand using exterior visual terms such as Brand Name, logo design and other things such as font style, colour, shape which differentiates the brand uniqueness from all other brands.
Brand Promise is a course of designing your brand slogan or tagline and that describes the promise and values that is experienced by the customers.
Brand Platform is a progress of delivering your vision and mission, values, corporate identity with the website to increase visibility.
Brand Promotion
It is a practice of creating trust and awareness on long established enterprise or any other company that offers high quality products or services at reasonable price among the customers. The promotion is one of the important elements of marketing mix.
Social Media Optimization is one of the possible ways to promote products and services towards the targeted audience and generate knowledge about the new offers from the trusted brand.
Online Reputation Management is strategy used to interact with audience regarding the brand and its features to build trust and encourage them to be converted as buyers as well as refer to others.
Why is it considered vital?
Brand Positioning is an approach used to inspire the buyer’s attention towards us by offering worthful marketing mix which includes the best product/service, cost, location and promotion compared to your competitors.
Brand Promotion is considered vital because of two significant grounds. They are:
• It acts as interactive medium between shopper and vendor while promoting a product or service or new offers to customers as well as others.
• It helps to recognize the product or services by distinguished brand name and increase its sales and demand.
LeadVisit is an Internet marketing brand in India, dedicated to shout and create awareness online on behalf of our clients for successive lead generation and unique visits by proven internet and digital marketing strategies.
Smarty – The Ultimate Template Engine
Smarty Introduction:
Smarty is an ultimate PHP template engine designed for programmers and designers to develop/deploy faster using proper separation of presentation layer from application layer such as template front end and PHP backend.
Use of Smarty in CMS:
Web Template system is a web publishing tool used in content management systems, software frameworks and HTML editors and many other contexts to process templates with PHP template engine like Smarty with the aim of creating web pages, and for deployment on the website then distributing across the Internet.
The use of smarty on CMS allows designer and programmer work independently without interfering in each other tasks. The designer deals with content elements such as Header, Footer, Navigation, and body, and HTML to offer a complete design of the template to provide the website an attractive look. While the programmer concentrates on manipulating and validating the business logic by extracting those elements with simple query from the database.
In smarty, we can also have logic on the presentation layer in case of PHP tags mixed with HTML as well as without logic when it is not required.
Advantages of Smarty:
1. It allows limitless nesting functions, if’s, else-if’s and more.
2. The engine is offered with built-in caching, custom cache handling function and highly customizable even though it is possible to embed your PHP code with template files.
3. The arbitrary template sources with plug in architecture are present.
4. Extremely fast and efficient as PHP parser compiles multiple times, where the Smarty compiles only once.
5. It’s really smart on recompiling the template files that have changed.
6. Highly extensible Template language, as you can create custom functions and variable modifiers.
Designers and Developers do what they are expert in, and ensure the time productiveness during the project development as well.
We at TreeShore believe in resourceful and an immensely innovative product design. Our web development professionals can add excellent attributes and features to a website with the best expertise available. We use integrated service methodologies at workplace to reach out to our client’s needs. Our experts are well versed in areas of software design, development, quality engineering, and maintenance.
Google: Search Master’s new strategy on Search
The Search Master Google has updated last week with some changes with new features as well as its algorithm. Every time Search master gets updated it concentrates on user experience and helps the searchers get fresh content. Over the past few weeks, they rolled out 10 recent algorithmic changes which are less susceptible to gaming as per Matt Cuts, Google’s Distinguished Engineer. Of the above 10, we are providing some of them here.
Cross-Language Information Retrieval Update: The Google started providing relevant English web pages for a query with less web content by translating the titles of the English pages and display below the English titles. When you click the translated title you will be taken to the translated page from English to query language.
Caffeine Web Indexing System update: The caffeine Web indexing system is one of the algorithms that allow Google to crawl and index fresh content as quickly as possible. There is a significant update which reflects 35 percent roughly in serving more relevant and up-to-date results.
Extending Application Rich Snippets: This update help searchers view the information like price details, user reviews etc within their search results.
Snippets with More content AND Less Header/Menu: This involves in choosing relevant results texts by spotting the page content and less text from the Header/menu.
Refining Official Page Detection: This update helps Google to provide more authoritative and relevant results by determining which pages are official and likely to rank well even more.
Prediction Fix for IME Queries: The update improve Google in handling auto complete IME queries even better than before.
Improvements to Date Restricted Queries: This is an update to help Google serve appropriate and fresh results within a specified date range as requested by the user.
Retiring a signal in Image Search, Better page titles by de-duplicating the boilerplate anchors, Length based auto complete predictions in Russian are the other 3 updates which are said to be important in serving results till next update, but not only this will help you to rank well as Google is making hundreds and more updates every year which you could not even imagine.
Plus One at Image Search: The Google retired one signal from image search and added plus one as a new signal which helps in Online Reputation Management, as well helps users to recommend their friends about an image they have liked.
These are the Search Master’s new strategy updated to rank well and serve better results to users worldwide.
Strategic Process for Successful Web Application Development
The practice on developing web applications is known as Web Application Development. Such a practice of developing web application is a bit complex than website development because of some risk factors that can cause critical problem. To avoid such risks and develop a successful Web Application a strategic process should be practised.
Strategic Process
The strategic process consists of five different phases for productive and successful web application development. They are Requirement and Analysis, Research and Analysis, Design and Development, Testing, Support. These phases are further classified and described below.
Requirement Analysis
The requirement analysis is a phase where client specification data such as their needs and demands are analysed to provide solutions through innovative ideas.
Research and Analysis
The phase consist of two different phases such as identifying the business model of the client and understanding their business process to collect data before start designing the user interface of web application.
Design and Development
This phase is categorized as design phase and development phase. The design phase cover’s user interface design and mock-ups, client review and iteration. The development phase consists of deployment and Testing.
Design Phase
In design phase, the user interface design is created using the data collected during the research and analysis phase and send for mock-ups. The mock-ups are defined as the model of a design to demonstrate the functionality of a system. After demonstration, if any positive client feedback are taken into account during the iteration phase. The iteration phase is defined as the practice of redesign to reach the appropriate design with the client feedback.
Development Phase
The development phase is where the behaviour driven development of the application is analysed and deployed step by step with proper concentration and innovation.
Testing
After the development of application, it is tested for quality after Integration. If changes required then the development phase is repeated till achieving the desired goal of the application development.
Support
The support phase comprises the demo and training of the successful web application. The support and maintenance is offered till the client satisfies with the productive application development.
TreeShore experts are well versed in areas of Web Application design, development, quality engineering, and maintenance. We have experience team specialised in developing software using Java, PHP and MYSQL. Our extended development team helps organizations to deliver the promised products at the right time for the required solution. Web-based applications include database integration and deployment of intranet and extranet applications.
Tips to accomplish effective online presence
Nowadays World Wide Web has increasing competition with the arrival of new businesses online. To sustain the competition and reach your goals you need a website which serves as conversion engine effectively. To design and develop a website as conversion engine expert developer with a Search engine optimizer is unpreventable. A website developed with proper optimization as per the search engine guidelines will lead you ahead of all other competitors. Here are some tips to make a website accomplish its effective online presence.
Design and Develop a website that has a load time less than 10 seconds with 56k modem as much as possible. Since it is one of the ranking signals as well as avoids the user’s extreme dislike.
Optimize images with appropriate file format such as GIF, PNG, and JPEG. Reduce the image dimensions using image editors such as Photoshop, Microsoft picture manager etc. Compress the content of all your webpage data into solitary file with reduced file size using tools like HTTP compression. Place the CSS style sheet and Java script at the end of HTML which restricts such design files to be downloaded every time when the page is requested.
Design and develop a website with Spider and User friendly Navigation. It allows search engine to crawl easily as well as helps user to navigate easily. Avoid canonical pages, doorway pages and orphan pages and maintain a proper hierarchy throughout the website. Use customized error pages to guide your users to a proper webpage who mistyped or clicked an expired link of your website. Sitemap XML and HTML should be created for both search engines and users.
Use unique Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords for every page. Use 6 to 12 words with minimum 66 characters which is good length for a title and try to place the primary keywords first. Don’t stuff keywords in Meta description instead use 25 to 30 words within 150 to 160 characters maximum and develop it in a sentence structure. Meta keywords should 100 to 250 characters and don’t place repeated keywords next to each other. Use keywords or Phrases from your actual content.
Link building strategy is an appropriate task which increases your authority for the most suitable keyword. Start link building with various strategies such as directory submission, social bookmarking, forum posting, profile creation, link wheel, article submission etc. Do not submit to Free for All sites. Try to build links in proper category of a good page rank sites.
The above tips are white hat SEO strategies that can help your website accomplish your online presence more effectively.
TreeShore is an information technology services company situated in Chennai, India. TreeShore focuses on SEO friendly website design, website development, e-commerce, Software development. LeadVisit is an Internet Marketing brand dedicated by us to shout online and create awareness online on behalf of our clients for successful lead generation and unique visits by proven Internet and Digital Marketing Strategies.