Empowering Joomla! Developers with Knowledge

Given enough time, that "ahha" moment eventually comes. The penny drops. The jigsaw puzzle starts to take shape. I clearly remember when I "got" MVC (Model View Controller) theory and realised my folly at being staunchly opposed to it.

The same can be said for documentation and, in particular, developer documentation. It’s a daunting task to work out how to organise hundreds of pages of information just about how you write code to work in Joomla!. We have five types of extensions, three types of applications, all sitting on top of a multi-layer framework involving hundreds of PHP classes and supported by over a dozen third party libraries. Making sense has been a significant challenge that has taken some lateral thinking to solve.

Enter the Wiki - some refuse to use them while others stare in wonder at the organised chaos as if looking at a representation of the Lorenz butterfly. This is one of the tools we are now using to address the enormous task of documenting all aspect of Joomla!. In this article, I want to spend some time going over how we have been structuring our sites to help developers find the information they need.