So I am new to Joomla but I have been a PHP developer for several years.
I was looking around trying to find some way to pull data from a mySQL database and display it within a Joomla website?
I have, for example, a database with like 30,000 products in it that gets updated everyday with new products... I just need to display and let people search through them... I have a shopping cart backend that would be seperate from Joomla (MAS 200 EBusiness Module) so I would just need to add a Link to each product that takes them to the cart outside of Joomla. Basically a product catalog.
...so basically you have an external db table(s) that contains all of these 30K+ products and want to show a list/tabular display/catalog thingy within a Joomla site that allows people to query/filter/search the list/tabular display/catalog thingy...then present them with a link back outside of Joomla to your external shopping cart?
Fabrik (
www.fabrikar.com
) will easily do this for you; a few elements, a few simple 'joins' to join the tables, and a little Javascript action to redirect and voila.
There is a wealth of information in the forums over there, and if you become a member, I am sure Hugh and Rob can point you in the right direction if you can't get there on your own.
There is a learning curve, given the power of this component, but once you get your head around it, it's like riding a bike, per se...