NYCPHP Meetup

[Gary Mort]

I have not read the WROX book except a brief overview in Borders and it 
seemed ok.

Packt's book is very good for learning the basics of component 
development.  Initially, I did not get much out of it, but I found it a 
handy, small reference guide later.

We(the NYC Joomla User Group) also have a copy of the Packt book in our 
library, so if you would like to come to the next meeting in February 
and borrow it, you can either return it at the meeting after that or 
mail it back.  The fee for borrowing is to write a review of the book on 
our website(http://www.joomlanyc.org) as well as on Amazon or the 
publishers website. :-)

Now, all of that said, these books are for /general/ Joomla component 
development.

Login, User Validation, and Registration are in fact a somewhat 
different kettle of fish.  As both of these require somewhat specialized 
knowledge of how the user database is configured. This also changes from 
version to version in a small respect.  Prior to Joomla 1.0.12 
password's were stored in an encrypted manner in the database.  From 
1.0.13 onwards, the encryption method changed slightly.

Rather than writing a component for these areas, you have 2 other options.

Option 1:
For both Joomla 1.0.13 and Joomla 1.5, install Community Builder and 
build a plugin for that.  Community Builder exposes some events for 
registration and logon that you can hook into if you wish to do 
something at those points.

For Joomla 1.5 there is no need for CB as 1.5 will provide you it's own 
event system for registration and logon.

The 1.5 system is much richer than the CB system, which stands to reason 
since it was created afterwards.  Note, you can't mix and match event 
systems currently.  CB will not trigger the Joomla events if someone is 
logged on or registers through CB.  And Joomla 1.5 doesn't trigger the 
CB plugins when someone registers or logs on through there.(a place for 
a good project: write a registration plugin for CB which triggers the 
Joomla registration plugins - and a corresponding logon plugin which 
triggers the CB logon plugins.

Note, after reviewing the 2 items, and I will need to do some testing 
that keeps getting put off, I feel that the only workable process for 
integrating CB and Joomla 1.5 is to send registrations through CB, thus 
gaining the processing power of CB to do all sorts of extra things, but 
have Joomla handle the logons - thus giving you the ability to use 
Joomla logon plugins)



Mark Simko wrote:
> PACKT Publishing has an excellent book: Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension
> Development.
>
> There is also Professional Joomla! from WROX
>
> I can recommend both of them highly.
>