abernier

There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t.

R. Benchley

2 years ago

Normalizing Joomla! filesystem hierarchy

Here is the default Joomla! files structure in 1.5.x:

administrator
- backups
- cache
- components
  - com_component_name
- help
  - lang-LANG
- images
- includes
- language
  - lang-LANG
- modules
  - mod_module_name
- templates
  - template_name
cache
components
- com_component_name
images
includes
language
- lang-LANG
libraries
logs
media
- system
- (com|mod|plg)_extension_name

1. Issues

1.1. Redundancies

1.1.1 Components and modules names

What’s exactly the point of prefixing components and modules names in:

/components/com_component_name
/modules/mod_module_name

Since we already are in /components/ folder, what’s the purpose of prefixing com_ before the real name of the component? What about just components/component_name? (idem for module)

N.B: This issue does not appear neither in /plugins/ nor /templates/ folders, where we don’t plg_ nor tpl_ prefix sub-foders.

1.1.2 Module’s default file

Considering a module (eg, /modules/mod_MODULE_NAME/), why naming its index file: mod_MODULE_NAME.php?

Since we already are in its dedicated folder, what about just naming it: index.php?

1.1.3 Language files

Language files (back and front) are prefixed with lang-LANG.… Again, since they all have a containing directory, this prefix appears to be redundant. For example en-GB/en-GB.com_content.ini seems to be enough.

1.2 A level more!

1.2.1 Plugins

A plugin necessarily belongs to group and plugin’s files are directly put into it: plugins/group/plugin_name.*. What about adding a level more between group and files, eg: /plugins/group/plugin_name/*. It should solve issue when a plugin has more than 2 files, for example tinymce.

2 years ago