Joomla is an open-source  content management system (CMS), a web appliance, which you can use for any type of website (e.g. community portal, news site, portfolio, corporate sites, for blogging, etc.) And, I’ve been working with some Joomla projects for quite some time now and some clients requires me to do custom application. Joomla uses MVC (Model-View-Controller) web application architecture, so it really requires you to examine the file structure to do custom coding.

Anyway, a recent client asked me to do some custom pages outside the pre-defined files of Joomla and it must pass some session variables. Joomla has its own class for session handling but only applicable inside its system can use it. So, when handling session outside the system, how can we do it? It’s simple. You just need to define the framework path of Joomla in your code. Include these lines:

define( '_JEXEC', 1 );
define( 'DS', DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR );
define('JPATH_BASE', dirname(__FILE__) );