CMS Series:Joomla and Drupal

A pluginis a kind of joomla extension. Plugins provide functions which areassociated with trigger events. Joomla provides a set of coreplugin events, but any extension can fire events. When a particularevents occurs, all plugin functions of the type associated with theevent are executed in sequence. This is a powerful way of extendingthe functionality of the joomla framework. It also offers extensiondevelopers a wat to allow other extensions to respond to theiractions, making extension extensible.

Thejoomla plugin architecture follows the observer design pattern. Alluser templates installed on a joomla site are stored in thetemplate directory, which is located at the root directory of ajoomla site.

Joomlaoperates directly with the php language and the joomla applicationitself is a framework of php classes. By addressing some of thejoomla objects such as Jdocument and JdocumentHTML in your templatecode, you can render output of modules and components, as well asretrieve information about the current executionenvironment.

A regionis essentially a section of the page on your site. Your can defineas many regions as you wish in your .info file, but you mustinclude page_bottom,page_top,help and content in your .info file,as core requires those regions to function properly. The next stepis to update your page.tpl.php file to address your newregions.

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