Joomla is the world's most popular system for building and managing websites. It is an example of a 'content management system' - often abbreviated to CMS. This article discussess some of the reasons for Joomla's popularity.

Why Use a CMS?

In the early days of the web, most websites consisted of static html pages. The site content of a typical website seldom changed, and when it did, it was neccessary to edit the actual page html code, requiring at least a basic level of expertise. However, for all but the most simple of websites, these days this is not a practical way to manage a website. Individuals and businesses want the freedom to be able to manage their site content without having to learn coding: the solution is a CMS.

For large businesses the preferred choice is always likely to be a custom CMS. However creating a custom CMS can be a complex, time and resource consuming process, requiring extensive programing, and will typically cost many thousands of pounds, making it an unrealistic option for small and even medium-sized businesses. Fortunately there are many 'off-the-shelf' content management systems available, the most popular of which is Joomla.

Self-Replicating Form Field for Joomla

There are times as a Joomla extension developer when it would be very useful to have a form field in Joomla that is capable of self-replication. For example, you want your user to be able to input some links, but you don't know in advance how many there will be, you want your user to be able to choose to add as many as they want without imposing any arbitrary limit. What you want is a self-replication form field that can return its values as an array.

Well now you can have one. We have designed a system of self-replicating form fields for Joomla extensions. The variable field form field can be used to generate self-replicating fields of most of the Joomla standard field types, including text, textarea, list and other list based types, such as category or usergroup. The user will see the standard input field, plus buttons which allow the user to add or delete input fields, also to re-order them, also to re-order them up and down.

You can see a couple of simple examples, for the text and list fields, here.

Best of all, you can download it for free here.