Importing Joomla in NetBeans as a Project

Joomla! is a great CMS and the code is pretty well documented. At least as far as the code that I have read. To get the most from the documentation and classes in Joomla!, you should have it as a project in an IDE. The IDE will give you tools that allow you to explore the source code more fully.

Now, there are two ways of going about getting Joomla! in your NetBeans IDE. The first way, is you pull the project from the git repository as a project and start coding. Now you can do that, but there are a couple of drawback to doing so. First, you have to do something with the installation folder to make Joomla! run, and second, you have to be careful not to push your changes up stream. Now if you are intending on modifying the Joomla! code base, then maybe that is okay. The second way is to add Joomla! to your project as existing code. Since we have no desire to modify the actual Joomla! Code base, this works well for us. We just want the ability to work on our extension and be able to use some of the features of the IDE to look around the Joomla! code base and get some code completion. So let's get started.

Step 1 – Create a new project in NetBeans and add Joomla!

Open NetBeans and click File | New Project or press [CTRL][SHIFT][N] on your keyboard. When the New Project dialog opens select PHP from the categories list and then select PHP Application with Existing Sources from the Projects list. Click the next button. Now for the sources folder click the Browse button and navigate to your joomdev folder on your desktop (or where ever you created your document root folder). With the joomdev folder selected click the OK button. Joomla 3.x requires php version 5.3.10 or higher to work. In the php version box, select version 5.4. Next, check the box that reads “Put NetBeans metadata into a separate directory”. Click the Browse button and select the NetBeansProjects folder in your home directory and click OK. Now click the Finish button on the dialog.

That's it!! Now you can explore the Joomla! Source code from within the NetBeans IDE!!