Blog entries tagged PHP

Joomla 1.5 Custom Breadcrumbs

Garrett Bluma — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 06:00:00 +0100

Joomla seems to have everything figured out — Breadcrumb support is no exception.

Recently we were writing some custom component for a client and needed to handle the breadcrumbs in a special way that Joomla couldn't manage automatically.

As a simplified example, imagine we redirect a user to a component that isn't attached to a menu. We would expect the breadcrumbs to simply output "Home" and provide a link back to the index of the site.

Home

(Notice: Home is not a Read More...

Joomla 1.5 Database Functions

Trevor M. — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 06:00:00 +0100

Sometimes it may be hard to know how to best use Joomla's database class. Here are just a few of the most used database functions.

In Joomla 1.5, include the following line of code inside your php:

<?php
$database =& JFactory::getDBO();
?>

Use the $loadObject function when you want to retrieve one row from the database. For example:

$database->setQuery("SELECT * FROM jos_comprofiler WHERE idRead More...

Changing a New Line to a Break

Trevor M. — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 06:00:00 +0100

There is a great php function takes a variable and changes the new lines (\n) into breaks (<br/>).

For example, a user submits a form on your website and used a textarea to submit a couple of paragraphs. You then retrieve this data from the database and echo it out in html. You will notice that it is now just one big paragraph.

To fix this problem, you the function: nl2br

Here is how you might use this:

<?php
&Read More...

XMLWriter in PHP

Garrett Bluma — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 06:00:00 +0100

Every now and then I find myself needing to export a set of objects to XML. I usually find a quick way to write a dumb function to do it, but this is usually not the most elegant solution and rarely does it scale up to handle more complex data structures. The other option is to serialize the data into xml, but usually these methods suffer from a large performance overhead and should only be used if you can tweak the serializer to work only the right pieces of data.

I have since added Read More...

Parsing an XML string retrieved using AJAX

Trevor M. — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 07:00:00 +0100

While working on an AJAX function this week, I found the need to parse an XML string using JavaScript and PHP. The following JavaScript was used to retrieve an XML string from a PHP file:

function someJavascriptFunction() {
      xmlHttp=GetXmlHttpObject();
      url = "/components/com_component/ajax/ajax.php?task=someTask";
      url += "&cc_number="+document.getElementById('cc_number').value;
      xmlHttp.open("GET",url,true);
      xmlHtRead More...

Writing a Joomla 1.5 Content Plugin

Garrett Bluma — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 07:00:00 +0100

This article will show you how to build a quick plugin to replace some text in an article before it get's displayed to the user.

Intro

Lately I've been writing a number of content plugins for Joomla. They're pretty simple, but basically it allows you to transform the content at a number of points in Joomla's process of editing, saving, and displaying of that content. In theory you could use it to do anything but it's common to replace text and/or add special content into the articlesRead More...