Component Concept

Components like templates have both Front End and Back End sections as per the last section.
Components also can have many parts to them.



Like Modules and Plug-ins which will cover later on.
Most of the time Back End components will have a Front End version of itself.
This is not a rule components do not need to have one or the other in order to work.

A good question is How Do Components get called and render in the Front End template?
Believe it or not with just one tag.



You can think of it as a main body tag in the center of your template.
Joomla then renders the content in your template based on the type of link past to it.

An example: If you look at your web browser address bar when at a Joomla site.
http://www.domain.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=43&Itemid=43

This tells the com_content component AKA that Joomla core article component to show us article number 43.
Joomla does its magic and then renders the article in the center of the template or where ever you added the tag.
This could have just as easily have been http://www.domain.com/index.php?option=com_weblinks&view=categories&Itemid=48
For the Web Links component.

Now components can be almost anything you can think of there are a ton of third party extensions that one can add to Joomla.
Components also can have modules that render parts of its content in other pages when one is not viewing the component.
More on Modules next.