Creating the module PHP file

There is actually more than one PHP file used in our module, we are going to create three. We will start out by creating a file mod_latestextensions.php in our mod_latestextensions folder, which is the first file that is executed when Joomla! loads our module. Create the file and add the following code:

<?php
defined('_JEXEC') or die;

require_once __DIR__ . '/helper.php';

$list = mod_latestextensionsHelper::getList($params);
$moduleclass_sfx = htmlspecialchars($params->get('moduleclass_sfx'));
require JModuleHelper::getLayoutPath('mod_latestextensions', $params->get('layout', 'default'));

All our PHP files will include the defined or die statement that prevents people from directly executing this PHP file. We then use require_once to load a helper file which we are going to use to do all our database queries and prepare the data for the view.

require_once __DIR__ . '/helper.php';

We then need to load the data from the helper and put it into an array called...