Joomla is a great content management system and once you get to know about the structure of components, modules and plugins you can begin to create your own custom extensions.  However, online documentation is pretty sparse when it comes to this part - the most in-depth documentation usually only consists of how to create a 'Hello World' extension.

As a newcomer to the world of Joomla I found this lack of tutorials quite frustrating so I've decided to write my own.  The following instructions explain how to create a module from scratch that includes parameters, a third party library and a Google map chart.  Once finished we will have a module that displays visitor information on a map of the world using data grabbed from Google Analytics.  Hopefully this will shed some light on the topic for some of you.