It would be great to have just a very short tutorial on how to add to or customise downloaded components.

Personally I'm very happy with what Cook is producing as a component, its doing 90% of the work for me, but to actually use the component I need to actually add a few bits, I need a file picker. I am reasonably capable at programming and can get the standard joomla image picker to appear, but just cannot get it to insert the value into the database field. I know I am missing something quite simple and I will kick mysefl when I find out what it is.

A very short tutorial in handling these type of issues I think would be of massive benefit to many people like myself. I am completely willing to put in the work to finish off a component, but a simple problem like this really is a show stopper.

Alternatively, if anyone else on the forum knows how exactly to do this, then I would love to know

I found this book useful:
Learning Joomla 1.5 Extension Development
It is a bit old now, perhaps there is a 1.7 version somewhere.

thanks for the suggestion, I'll have a look, but whereas I can get these things to work within standard joomla views, it doesn't seem to work with the Cook generated ones.

JDom is the only repported piece.
Overload classes (JController, JModels) are just some Classes extensions from the native design.

Almost of all the rest is Joomla standard.

Of course, Joomla offers you the liberty to write with you own style,
but the MVC structure, tables, view, templates, helpers ... are simple to understand with the Joomla manuals.

sure, tables, views, css, templates I have no problems with.

What I have tried though is just taking the image upload function directly from the standard joomla contact component and putting it into a cook generated form. The modal picker/upload functuion appears fine and works. But when I click on "insert" it just hangs. It's missing the return variable, but I cannot see where to get this from.

any suggestion on how to do this would be great, even just a pointer in the right direction

Hi,

I have "Mastering Joomla! 1,5", Extension and Framework Development, 2nd ed. It explains in detail how to modules, components and plugins work.

Rick

Excellent Book.

Hi, thanks for the suggestion, would this all be relavant for joomla 1.7 as well?

If so, I'll try and get hold of it, (not easy to get books in Thailand.)

Hi,

Developing in 1. 5 and 1.6/17 are different, just how different I'm not sure since I've only doing some work using 1.5. I would look at Joomla's development section and see the difference between a 1.5 and 1.6 component. There's also a topic about converting from 1.5 to 1.6 extensions that would give an idea what involved on upgrading.

Rick