Item Helper plugin for Joomla 3 and 4

This plugin processes Custom Fields for easier access, and provides additional helper functions when working with Items (such as Articles and Users).

UPDATE NOVEMBER 2022

Mity Digital no longer create websites using Joomla, and as such, no longer maintaining or updating this plugin. Feel free to fork it to your heart's content.

Support is no longer available for this plugin.

Installation

Download the latest release, and install it via Joomla's Extensions administrator interface.

Updates

When installed, this plugin will be updated through Joomla's Extensions update process.

How to use

The Item Helper library is automatically included for content through Joomla's onContentPrepare event. For most cases, you won't need to do anything else.

You will need to either add the Item Helper's namespace to your code, or use the full namespaced reference:

use Mity;
ItemHelper::getArticleById(123);
ItemHelper::getFieldValue($item, 'my-field');

or

\Mity\ItemHelper::getArticleById(123);
\Mity\ItemHelper::getFieldValue($item, 'my-field');

Get an Article by ID

This is a simple shortcut to load an Article for a given ID. This is purely a helper to make it effortless for you to load an article.

ItemHelper::getArticleById($artice_id);

Accepts:

• $article_id of the Joomla Content Article to load

Returns:

• a Joomla Article item

Get Field Value

Get the Value of a given Custom Field for an Item.

ItemHelper::getFieldValue($item, $field);

Accepts:

• The $item to process
• The $field to find - this is the Name of your Field.

Returns:

• the field value, if found

Get Field Label

Get the Label of a given Custom Field for an Item.

ItemHelper::getFieldLabel($item, $field);

Accepts:

• The $item to process
• The $field to find - this is the Name of your Field.

Returns:

• the field's label, if found

Get Field Options

Get the Options of a given Custom Field for an Item.

ItemHelper::getFieldOptions($item, $field);

Accepts:

• The $item to process
• The $field to find - this is the Name of your Field.

Returns:

• the field's options, if applicable

Get Field Group ID

Get the Group ID of a given Custom Field for an item

ItemHelper::getFieldGroupId($item, $field);

Accepts:

• The $item to process
• The $field to find - this is the Name of your Field.

Returns:

• the field's Group ID, if applicable

Truncate

Truncate a string to a given number of characters.

The output string may be longer than the $numberOfCharacters because the function is designed to not break words.

ItemHelper::truncate($string, $numberOfCharacters = 160, $includeEllipsis = true);

Accepts:

• The string to truncate
• The $numberOfCharacters to aim for (see note above)
• Boolean $includeEllipsis to include "..." or not

Returns:

• the field's Group ID, if applicable

Process

This is automatically called when interacting with the item.

ItemHelper::process($item);

The process method $item is passed by reference, and will be modified by the Item Helper. Because of this, you do not need to store the returned variable, which is the modified $item.

com_content.article and com_users.user will automatically be detected. If you are using a different type alias, you will need to pass this as the second parameter.

ItemHelper::process($item, 'com_customcomponent.typealias');

To save processing, when an $item has been processed, the processing is skipped on future requests. If you need to force a re-process, you can pass true as the third parameter. If using automatic type alias detection, pass false as the second parameter, or your custom type alias.

ItemHelper::process($item, false, true);

Re-process

You can call reprocess as a shortcut to the process call above.

ItemHelper::reprocess($item);

This will use the default type aliases of com_content.article or com_users.user, or you can pass your own custom type alias just like the process function.

Manually including the Item Helper

If you need to include the Item Helper yourself, you can include the library manually:

require_once(JPATH_PLUGINS.'/content/mityitemhelper/ItemHelper.php');

You can then use the Item Helper as you normally would.

License

This addon is licensed under the MIT license.