Question

I am very new to Joomla and few plugins in Joomla uses variables like with {} brackets. For example ‘{mosmap}’ displays Google maps in Joomla. I want to know how it works so that I can customize the plugin for my requirements.

Answer 1

{} in joomla, [] in wordpress, they are called replacement tags. I’ve never done Joomla pluggins although i did some modules and components but i did shorttags in WordPress and my guess is they work the exact same way.

The engine, Joomla or WordPress, detects {} or [] and parses the content into something that can be transfered to your pluggin and then your pluggin can act on it.

For example, in WordPress:

[mytag id="6" image="blabla.jpg"]

Relays to my wordpress plugin as an array in my function like:

function mytag_plugin($data){
    var_dump($data);
}

array(2){
    [id] => (int)6,
    [image] => (string)"blabla.jpg",
}

I’ll recommend reading http://docs.joomla.org/Plugin for more information on it…