Post
by bobbykjack » Thu Mar 15, 2012 11:46 am
Firebug can only inspect the DOM, which is rendered from the HTML that is sent to your browser when it makes a request. Whether an individual piece of content comes from a flat file, a piece of code, a database, or a third-party via an AJAX request, firebug cannot possibly know. Only a human being with intelligence and access to the backend can do that :-)
My general advice, for finding out where an individual piece of content comes from is:
1. Get to know your backend. In the case of joomla, dig through the modules, components, plugins, etc. that you have in use. Get familiar with the core joomla code. Understand the general mechanisms for how Joomla! fetches content.
2. As a companion technique, get familiar with the UNIX find command. This is a very simple way of finding the source of anything - a particular class, some text, markup, etc. The general form I use is:
find /path/to/joomla -exec grep -l 'search-text' {} \;
That basically says 'look for "search-text" in all files below the joomla root", and print the names of those that contain it. You can easily use find to restrict the search to just CSS files, just files that have changed within the last 2 days, etc. It's really very powerful, and will help you understand just how joomla puts things together.
