Dynamic Hacking aka Overrides
Written by Rob | 09.19.09
Although I had noticed duplicate folders from the Joomla core appearing in a html folder in several Joomla 1.5 templates I had downloaded, I only understood their relevance (despite having edited them on a couple of occurrences) once I happened upon an online article yesterday.
These duplicate folders and files seemed to simply duplicate actions already in the core, necessitating that I hack two instances to get the one result depending on whether the same template was being used throughout the site. Silly, of course, but that's how it goes when you do most of your learning through a suck em and see approach.
So I was spending a bit of free time on one of my own pet projects www.eclecticmeme.com which is essentially an online novel. Of course, the attempt is to allow online and multimedia technology influence the actual experience, nonetheless it is a novel and I want the contents page to look more like a contents page of a physical book than the standard Joomla blog or table layout.
I vaguely remembered an article called "How to make Joomla section look like a book contents page", and sure enough on googling this I was quickly brought to The Art of Joomla! run by AndrewEddie. I took this opportunity to revisit the twitter account that I set up not too long ago in an attempt to join the world of the Joomla Artisan as espoused by Andrew... or it is Eddie? Now I've added a couple of Joomla experts and fans, you can check our account at http://twitter/emc23dotcom :)
AndrewEddie is one of the developers of Joomla 1.6 and his company has donated several functions to the project. Meanwhile, he runs a subscription site for the more advanced Joomla users and developers. Along with the paid subscription articles, AndrewEddie provides a few freebies including the aforementioned article. Thus I was introduced to overrides.
And what are overrides?
Overrides are hacks to the core Joomla code, only instead of overwriting the official code (only to be overwritten during a future upgrade or update), this code resides in the template structure and only comes into action if that particular template is used. Neat!!! This may be standard practice in the programming world but once again I'm getting a kick out of watching Joomla lead the way in separating content from code and the new avenues of possibility that this entails.
Of course, it can have its bad side too. JA Purity, a template which is included in the Joomla install, I believe brought with it overrides that introduced security issues. This has since been fixed in Joomla 1.5.11, but as ever, the moral of this story is keep an eye on them security updates.
For a web developer, being able to play with those tables is well cool :)
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