The Techjoomla Blog

Navigating the learning curve: a developer's perspective on leveraging AI tools like Cursor.ai for Joomla 3 development, from initial hurdles to achieving desired outcomes through clear communication and a structured approach

As a developer at Tekdi, I'm always exploring ways to streamline workflows while staying true to our core value of "giving back" to the open-source community. The promise of AI-assisted coding is compelling, but how does it fit into our philosophy of building sustainable, community-focused solutions? When a client asked me to add a new feature to an existing Joomla 3 custom component—a legacy project that needed to remain on version 3 for specific business requirements—I saw the perfect opportunity to test Cursor.ai while maintaining our commitment to open-source excellence.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is revolutionizing how AI assistants interact with external systems. Think of it as a universal translator that allows AI tools to understand and manipulate any application's data through natural language. For legacy systems like Joomla—and countless other platforms built before the AI revolution—MCP opens up unpreceden...

Every developer uses a set of tools that simplifies their life and without which their development life feels crippled! Over the years, I have developed my own set of tools which I have described in this blog.

In this series of blogs, we will talk about common mistakes to avoid while building extensions for Joomla!.

In this particular blog, we will talk about these four common mistakes:

• Not using language constants and instead of hard coding language strings
• Not using JInput and instead directly accessing $_POST or $_GET
• Not using the Joomla Database layer and writing plain database queries instead
• Wrong usage of loadObjectList / loadAssocList() (Using loadObjectList() when just 1 row is needed)

Joomla has tried to create a content manager / CCK for several years now. Though the project has been inactive, there are a few database tables that Joomla still uses, mainly for storing content history. Although the original UCM in its spirit isn’t part of Joomla, similar functionality has been introduced by article fields. 

I recently happened to have a client approach us to build a mobile app. What should have been a fairly quick job turned out into a mid sized development project. The reason ? They had created almost half a dozen custom components where articles could have served the purpose.

Are you building admin list-view in your Joomla Extension? Do you want to include Search Tools in your Joomla 3.x extension? Here is a quick guide to doing so in easy steps.

First, we will check the folder structure needed, and then we will see sample code.

When you are custom developing on top of JomSocial, you sometimes need to Catch Ajax calls for modifications. This Quick tutorial will take you through how you can do this.

Sometimes, you might have operations like crons running PHP scripts behind the scenes. If there are any errors in it, it can become difficult to debug them since they might not affect the entire website. Whether you are doing this with any PHP framework or in a Joomla component, logging can help you debug such issues.Here is how you can use Joomla'...

This Blog is specially targeted for developers and people who use Jomsocial Jomsocial!  Which turns Joomla CMS into a full-fledged socialnetworking website. While using your own component with Jomsocial you need to make sure that your component is tightly integrated with it and most important is you are notified of the activities happening.   In Jo...

Recently, we had a chance to develop a Payment gateway plugin for HikaShop. We thought this would be a good chance to share a small overview with everyone!

Let's Get started. 

This is the first of our Blogs in the Joomla 3.0 Discovery series. Joomla 3.0 is an awesome release & we are discovering new stuff with it as we use it every day. We hope to share our new found knowledge with the community through this series. The series will cover topics for end users, administrators as well as developers.  Converting Joomla E...

Joomla 3.0 was released a few minutes back & it brings some revolutionary changes to the Joomla world. From 1.0 to 1.5 to 2.5, Joomla has been notorious for laborious migration processes. We bid adieu to migrations with 3.0. I admit this has really happened in the 1.6, 1.7 versions which were at the best forgettable. So 3.0 is the first real version that shows this. This I believe is the biggest news for Joomla end users. With this Joomla has given yet another reason to stick with this awesome & versatile platform.

01 Joomla 3.0 for Integrators & Site Builders & End Users-  Bye Bye to Migrations & Hello to Upgrades!

02 Joomla 3.0 For Developers - JUI & Bootstrap Uniform & great looking UI without having to Code!

03 Joomla 3.0 - For End Users - Great new UI & UX, Responsive by Default. Mobile Here we come!

One of the major headaches of maintaining a Joomla demo is that you have to refresh the data every now & then to restore the demo to its best as user usage can change a lot of data & interfere with the optimum demonstration of your products. We used to do this by simply having a cron job restore a backup of the database with the optimum data. But this had major issues as we had to upgrade extensions on the demo to the latest & these in some cases also involved structural database changes.

Everyone using Jomsocial like how they show those nice popup windows when you add friends, send a message or join a group.

In a project where you integrate more features or other extensions into Jomsocial, it's important to use the same look and feel for the popups so that there is a consistent look throughout the site. With Jomsocial's plugin architecture it is possible to add your own popups and actions. We're demonstrating here an example, which allows you to group your friends as Friends/Family/Acquaintances etc