A little background: while working on the EventList Twitter Status plugin I got frustrated at having to have an Itemid parameter in the plugin parameters. I wanted the script to automatically append the correct Itemid to the URL that gets submitted to Twitter (via TinyURL). However, it seemed that there’s no built-in way to do this using the Joomla API – not when we’re talking about a backend script. If it were a frontend one, we could easily detect the Itemid contextually, i.e. based on which page is being viewed at the time, for example:
JRequest::getVar(‘Itemid‘);
//(detects current page’s Itemid)
Or to detect the URL of a specified menu item:
$menuitem = “34″; //this can be set manually or by your script
$item = JFactory::getApplication()->getMenu()->getItem( $menuitem );
$url = JRoute::_($item->link . ‘&Itemid=’ . $item->id);
However, the above method means that you must already know the Itemid, since the menu id *is* the Itemid. So it’s only good for detecting the URL.
So how do we find out an appropriate Itemid for URLs created on the fly in the backend?
After scouring a lot of posts on the Joomla forum and elsewhere, and also after reading all the available documentation, I got frustrated and just wrote a quick and dirty query:
$queryitemid = “SELECT * FROM #__menu WHERE type=’component’ AND link LIKE ‘%com_eventlist%view=eventlist%’ ORDER BY id ASC LIMIT 1″;
$db->setQuery($queryitemid);
$itemid = $db->loadResult();if((!itemid) || ($itemid == ”) || ($itemid == NULL)){
//echo “resorting to backup Itemid detection<br>”;
//if default ‘eventlist’ view not found in menu, look for other menu items and use the first one (lowest itemid)$queryitemid = “SELECT * FROM #__menu WHERE type=’component’ AND link LIKE ‘%com_eventlist%’ ORDER BY id ASC LIMIT 1″;
$db->setQuery($queryitemid);
$itemid = $db->loadResult();}
if(($itemid != ”) && ($itemid != NULL)){
$itemid = $itemid;
}else{
//if EventList is now in a menu, use the Itemid set in the plugin parameters.
$itemid = $this->_params->get(‘itemid’);
}
I used a LIKE query to select the “eventlist” view type for the com_eventlist component. I could have avoided use of LIKE by doing a more complex query, and I’m not sure it would have offered much of a performance gain over this LIKE usage. Maybe if this were a script that’s being run a lot, but this only runs when someone adds an event or venue.
And then you’ll need technical assistance anyway. This *does* happen, so if you do install WordPress, here are the essential plugins I would recommend; All in One SEO Pack, Google Analytics for WordPress, Google XML Sitemaps, Sociable, WP-SpamFree, WP Super Cache.