Module / Ext Development

Hi All,

Firstly; sorry if someone has posted this previously - I had a look through and couldn’t find anything which answered my questions, so thought I would post myself.

For some background: I’ve been programming with php for some years now, and for the past 3 years or so, this has mainly centred around Joomla. Hopefully someone who responds to this has knowledge of Joomla components, but any help is welcome. I roughly have my head around the way that EE works, but now I have do some quite major development using it to create a job application.

So my first question is this: Considering the way a component is made in Joomla (with a link to that component in the back-end, and having various custom views for forms etc) Is it possible to create something similar in EE, whereby I control exactly how to output the look and feel of a custom view (which may be a form, or list of job applications etc.) ?

And secondly: If this isn’t the case, and I have to use the channels and custom fields method, how on earth do I manipulate that information in the admin area, so I can, for example list out a set of users who have attached to them, their first second and third choices of jobs?

I know it requires probably a rather lengthy answer to those, but any help would be welcome, as usual i’ve got a deadline and need to get my head round this.