Joomla! Platform MVC Example

This is a simple example using MVC layout of latest Joomla! Platform(12.1+). Since the official documents of Joomla! Platform are too weak, I hope this example can help people get familiar with the great development framework. Actually I'm new to this framework too, so if you had some advices please let me know without hesitation.

Features

• Single entry point for Web Application
• All the codes except index.php are in protected directory which can restrict to access easily
• Configuration file is JSON format
• SQLite database back-end
• A very rough and weak model inspired by Active Record using JTable
• Simple URL router which dispatch different requests to different controllers
• PHP-based template views using JDocument
• Two-pass rendering process, first partial view then the whole page
• Simple example for using the event dispatcher

Installation

Clone or Download Joomla Platform into joomla directory and this repository under the same parent.

mkdir playground
cd playground
git clone https://github.com/joomla/joomla-platform.git joomla
git clone https://github.scm.corp.ebay.com/letzhang/joomla-platform-mvc-example.git

Configuration

You can refer protected/config/main.dist.json and copy it into main.json for your own changes.

Notes

The new MVC framework of Joomla! Platform is quite lightweight.

• There is a JTable class providing support for Active Record Pattern but it's not involved with JModel by default. I wrote a simple model class which extends JTable.
• Controllers only support one executable task per class via the execute method. It's different from some other frameworks which provide two-layer "Controller-Action" support.
• The View is responsible for focusing on one model. To gathering the partial contents and redering the whole page, you can use JDocument. You can see the View layer is not so flexible.

Thanks

• Pull Tester by Louis Landry: https://github.com/LouisLandry/pulltester/
• A project from GSoC 2012: https://github.com/stefanneculai/Web-service-API/