Joomla get current language

The following code might be useful to you if you want to get the current language in your custom component/module/plugin.

It will get the current language that is active on the website:

$lang =& JFactory::getLanguage();
echo "The current language is:". $lang->getName();

Reference : JFactory/getLanguage - Joomla! Documentation

If you are learning to develop your own Joomla component, module or plugin, the following book is a must have.

You can get it for cheap on Amazon.

Adding additional Joomla registration fields

The default Joomla registration page is very basic. In many situations, one might want to add field to it. This is how to do it:

Just add the fields you want to the following files:

For saving the info

libraries/joomla/database/table/user.php

Display on registration page

components/com_user/views/register/tmpl/default.php 

For updating info

components/com_user/views/user/tmpl/form.php

Backend user form

administrator/components/com_users/views/user/tmpl/form.php

Replacing MySQL characters

The following MySQL query will replace all occurences of Ã§ in the column 'name' of the 'customers' table with ç

UPDATE customers SET name = replace(name,'ç','ç');

I found it useful especially after copying databases. Copying databases with different collations tend to screw up the characters (especially when working with French accents). So applying this query will fix things up.

This is also useful in many other situations where we will want to replace a character in the database. I leave it to you to think it out.

Update mySQL table with values from another table

Suppose we have two tables myCustomers and allCustomers. We can update the value of table myCustomers based on the value that is common to both tables.

Example

UPDATE myCustomers , allCustomers

SET myCustomers.name = allCustomers.name

WHERE myCustomers.email = allCustomers.email;

What we did here is update all the names of table 'myCustomers' with the names of table 'allCustomers' where their email matches.

Table 'myCustomers' can be a smaller table that stores a small amount of info and table 'allCustomers' can be a reference master table.

French unreadable characters

To fix the problem of unreadable french characters when pulling info from a MySQL database, do this:

$query = mysql_query("SET NAMES UTF8",$conn) or die(mysql_error());

That is, we change the collation of the names column to utf8.

Display number of items in category / subcategory

In many cases, one might want to display the number of items found in a category / subcategory. This is specially the case for classifieds websites.

For example,

Vehicles (30)

• Cars  (15)
• Bikes (13)
• Other (2)

This can be done by querying the database. In this case, I am using MySQL.

Let’s assume that we are passing the category id in the URL. So,

1. Get the category id from the URL

$cat = mysql_real_escape_string($_GET['category']);

2. Query the database with that id

$query = 'SELECT COUNT(*) as count FROM vehicles WHERE catId = '$cat'";

3. Build the query

$result = mysql_query($query);

4. Get the resulting row

$row = mysql_fetch_array($result);

5.  Finally, get the count field from the resulting row (this is the data we want)

$num_items_in_category = $row['count'];

Your comments are welcomed.

AJAX post with JQuery

JQuery allows us to pass info to the server and get back results without leaving the page. This comes in handy for example when we want to submit a form, authenticate users against a database, load photos etc. I mostly use it for when I want to communicate with a MySQL database.

Here is an example where I send an id to the server which queries a MySQL database and return back the user's name for me.

I have a div called 'loading' in my HTML form. Before passing information to the server, I want the user to get a message, tell him to wait (the time that the information is being fetched from the server). So, I display a message in the 'loading' div.

$("#loading").html('Please wait...');

I then get the value that I want to pass to the server from my form.

var id = $('#userid').val();

I then create a data string of all the variables that I want to send to the server. In this case I will only send an id to the server.

var dataString = 'id='+ id;

Now, we move on to the AJAX part.

$j.ajax({
type: "POST",
url: "components/com_etudes/assets/ajax/getData.php", data: dataString,
success: function(data) {
//Display a message $j("#messages").html(data).css("color","green"); 
} });

POST : The way we want to submit the data to the server. We can use POST or GET

URL: This is the path to the PHP script that will receive the data, processes it and return a response to the Client browser.

DATA: This is the data that we have (concatenation of all the variables that we have)

success: function(data) : This means that on success (i.e. if the script has been executed on the server without error). 'data' is a variable that contains the result sent from the server.

You see that I used the variable 'data' and updated the HTML of a div called 'messages'. That is this div 'messages' will get as content whatever was returned from the server.

SERVER PART

The getData.php is simple.

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1');

//Database connection

include('db.php');

//POST Variables

$id  = $_POST['id'];

$msg = '';

//Get the user

$SQL = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = ".$id; //execute the query $result = mysql_query($SQL,$conn) or die(mysql_error());
$row = mysql_fetch_array($result);
echo $row['name'];


So we basically passed an id to the server which queried a MySQL database and responded back with the name of the user that corresponded to the id passed. Simple!


Stay tuned for some other tips coming soon.

Hello World

This blog was created to provide tips and tricks to web programmers as I gain experience in my Web development career. I will try to structure my information into a step by step guide so that it can easily be understood. I will also be updating the blog regularly and answering to any questions you may have (in your comments). So be sure to subscribe to the blog.