For those interested, here are a few things that might be helpful to know:
- Joomla is mostly PHP and a bit of XML. So far, JavaScript knowledge hasn't been necessary.
- Joomla relies heavily on its own MVC (Model, View, Controller) architecture both in the frontend (what users see) and the backend (what Wes and crew see).
- Joomla's documentation isn't complete with regard to what we're trying to do here. Specifically, LanOC needs a Joomla 3.3 Component capable of supporting LAN seating functionality. All the documentation has been there to get the framework in place but implementing functions like Add, Edit, Delete for our data is at least partly missing from the wiki. This means we have to reference Joomla's public code on GitHub (github.com/joomla/joomla-cms) to try to reproduce similar functionality to be consistent with Joomla's UI.
- We deploy and test our work to free cloud instances of Joomla on www.cloudaccess.net, so getting up and running with our project should be pretty painless.
- The data model is MySQL and we're using MySQL Workbench to maintain the model.
- The suggested IDE for this project is Netbeans PHP (requires Java JRE >= 1.7). There are some config files in the GitHub project that help Netbeans work with the project. Netbeans also has GitHub integration.
If you're at all interested in at least learning more about what we need or how you can help, please feel free to hit me up via PM so we can schedule some time on TeamSpeak or another medium. Obviously, we'd love to find someone with Joomla Component experience to get us through some of the obstacles we're encountering but right now competent individuals who can learn from existing Joomla code and limited documentation will help this project advance.
