Joomla! Component skeleton or framework

I was going to develop a Joomla! Component for a client and started to read the documentation on how to build a Joomla! Component. I searched online for a skeleton or framework so I didn’t have to program that from scratch. Googeling it didn’t show up any really good results.

Until I realized there are actually services for this. Component Creator is one of them. Through a web interface you can specify the details for your component and you can download a ZIP-file which is installable for Joomla! to start bulding upon.

However, documentation is something not really existing for Component Creator. Instead there are community forums and some video tutorials. I was searching the forums for a specific matter and it turned out that the same question had been asked several times by other users. The reply from the Component Creator staff was that you will get the answer to that question by buying the Premium service. So instead of documenting an answer to a common question they want each client to contact the support team to get the answer, probably in order to sell more Premium subscriptions. A bit odd to me. The free service is so limited anyway so without the Premium subscription you quickly run into it’s limitations, so they will sell them anyway.

You should also be aware that Jensen Technologies who is behind Component Creator also is a consulting business offering development of Joomla! components. So your supplier will also be kind of your competitor. I am not saying they will go and steal your business or clients but it is not always a healthy thing when your supplier is also your competitor. Their in house developers will naturally always have the best support compared to their clients.  If it was me, I would have split it into two different companies.

Anyway, the Component Creator is a powerful and helpful tool when starting a new component project for Joomla!.

The video tutorials can be found here:

There is also a webinar recorded on Youtube here:

Below is a demonstration of building a component in 30 minutes using Component Creator by Søren Beck Jensen (2015).