Adding a Login/Logout link in Joomla Template

Posted by: gbluma on Mar 23, 2009 Print PDF

Tagged in: Untagged 

This should be a quick one, hopefully. It will require a bit of programming skill as well as some understanding of how Joomla works behind-the-scenes.

Joomla doesn't come with a built-in module for showing a Login/Logout link. I'm sure that someone in the community has made one, but for verbosity I'll explain how to build your own.

First, let's create a link in our template to send people to our login page.

index.php in template:

<?php
defined('_JEXEC') or die('Restricted access');
...
$user =& JFactory::getUser();  
echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?'.'>'; 
?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" 
	xml:lang="<?php echo $this->language; ?>" 
	lang="<?php echo $this->language; ?>" 
	dir="<?php echo $this->direction; ?>" >
<head>
...
</head>
<body>
...
	<!-- Start of Login Link -->
	<div class='loginBox'>
		<a href="/component/user/login">Login</a>
	</div>
	<!-- End of Login Link -->
...
</body>
</html>

index.php in template: 

...
	<!-- Start of Login Link -->
	<div class='loginBox'>
 		<a href="/component/user/login">
 			<?php echo ($user->guest) ? "Login" : "Logout" ?>
 		</a>
	</div>
	<!-- End of Login Link -->
...

Finally, let's add a little spice and show the person who they are logged in as in the same space.

index.php in template:

...
	<div class='loginBox'>
		<a href="/component/user/login">
<?php
 		if ($user->guest) {
 			echo '<a href="/component/user/login">Login</a>';
 		} else {
 			$name = $user->get('username'); 
 			echo "Logged in as " . $name . ", ";
 			echo '<a href="/component/user/login">';
 			echo '	Logout';
 			echo '</a>';
 		}
?>
 		</a>
	</div>
...

And that's it. I hope this was helpful, please let us know if we can improve this article below!

 


[ Back ]