TO-DO: Associate the filters for the modules (such as Leads, Accounts, etc.) with users, so that when users log in, they get to see only the filters that they created and which belong to them.

HOW-TO

• The file that handles the view based on filters seems to all be in modules/CustomView/CustomView.php
• The database tables that are used to store the filters are vtiger_cvstdfilter and vtiger_cvadvfilter
• vtiger_customview has the names of the filters, and the cvid field is used in the two tables above.

So we need to add a field to one of these tables.

We need to change search functionality in vTiger (version 5.0.x) so that we display details of only the leads/fields belonging to the user, and for the rest of the entries, display who it belongs to. How do we do that? This requires an understanding of the search functionality in vTiger.

When you search for an item using the search field on the top-right corner of your vTiger install, it sends a POST back to the index.php page.

The form name is “UnifiedSearch”, and a search for the word ’search’ on index.php takes us to this line:

    if($action == 'UnifiedSearch') {
    	$currentModuleFile = 'modules/Home/'.$action.'.php';
    } else {
		$currentModuleFile = 'modules/'.$module.'/'.$action.'.php';
    }

So, /modules/Home/UnifiedSearch.php is what we need to look at.

It looks like UnifiedSearch.php does the following:

1. Gets a list of modules that can be searched for using this function: getSearchModulesComboList($search_module);
2. Does the usual applying of templating and styles that are done for pretty much every vTiger page
3. Handles tag- and global- searches using getUnifiedWhere() and getTagWhere() function calls.

The getUnifiedWhere() and getTagWhere() function calls contain SQL statements – and something tells me these are the SQL statements that need to be modified for our search to be customized.

I just installed JoomFish, the translation content manager, for Joomla 1.5.9 on my 1and1 hosting service, and right away ran into PHP problems.

How did I solve it? It was pretty easy. I had to turn the PHP files into PHP5 in order for JoomFish to work.

Here’s how to do it: How to run PHP5 on 1and1.

And hey presto: it worked!

For version 1.0.x: normally, Joomla’s mosPathWay() and module would take care of generating links to sections and categories, but in case you ever needed to do it yourself:

        // TODO: You need someway to get $rid, which is the ID of the content item.
        // I usually get this in the main content.html.php page, so I use $row->id

        // The SQL to get the section and category for an article
        $sql = "SELECT c.title ctitle, c.id cid, s.title stitle, s.id sid FROM #__content co INNER JOIN #__categories c, #__sections s WHERE (co.id=$rid) AND (c.id=co.catid) AND (s.id=co.sectionid)";
        $database->setQuery($sql);
        $result = $database->loadRow();

        if ($result != null) {
                // Section page
                $sid = $result[3];
                $stitle = $result[2];
                $slink = sefRelToAbs("index.php?option=com_content&task=section&id=$sid");

                // Category page
                $cid = $result[1];
                $ctitle = $result[0];
                $clink = sefRelToAbs("index.php?option=com_content&task=category&sectionid=$sid&id=$cid");

                // Write out links
                $relatedSecCat = "Related articles: <a href='$slink'>$stitle</a> > <a href='$clink'>$ctitle</a>";
        }
        else $relatedSecCat = "";
        echo $relatedSecCat;

Problem: Even when you use mod_expires to cache content on your server, some redirects may break the cache headers so the mod_expires will not output the right headers. This especially seems to happen when you have CMSs like Joomla/Drupal with SEO features and are trying to cache them.

This is how the mod_expires was set up before

<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresDefault "access plus 20 minutes"
ExpiresActive On
</IfModule>

But these lines using mod_headers need to be added to remove the no-cache directives being output by the CMS:

Header unset Cache-Control:
Header unset Expires:
Header unset Pragma:
Header unset Keep-Alive:
Header unset Connection:

That removed the HTTP cache headers output by the CMS that seemed to be caused by the redirects (and which mod_expires was not replacing.)

You may need to enable mod_headers; it wasn’t enabled on my installation of Apache 2.2. The command to do that is:

a2enmod headers

For my first Joomla 1.5 module, I had to write a module that would get the contents from another webpage (actually, just a number) and display it in the module area.

To make it more challenging, I also added the following requirements:

• Has to use caching so as to not hit the webpage each time.
• Should allow the “template” for displaying the content to be editable by the webmaster

This is the code I wrote – simple, but its my first Joomla 1.5 module.

mod_webnumber.php

<?php
//no direct access
defined('_JEXEC' )
or die('Direct Access to this location is not allowed.');

// Get a reference to the global cache object.
$cache = & JFactory::getCache();
$cache->setCaching(1); // make sure it caches

$number  = $cache->call( array( 'Website', 'latestNumber' ) );

// get a parameter from the module's configuration
$template = $params->get('template');
$output = str_replace ("#n", $number, $template);

echo $output;

class Website {
    function latestNumber() {
        // Get the latest number from the webpage
        $number = file_get_contents (
          "http://www.yourwebsite.com/");
        $number = strip_tags ($number);

        return $number;
    }
}
?>

mod_webnumber.xml (mostly derived from the official Joomla docs site on creating a module, following is only the parameters I used which the module depends on)

    <files>
        <!-- The "module" attribute signifies that this is the main controller file -->
        <filename module="mod_webnumber">mod_webnumber.php</filename>
    </files>
<params>
        <param name="moduleclass_sfx" type="text" default="" label="Module Class Suffix" description="PARAMMODULECLASSSUFFIX" />
        <param name="@spacer" type="spacer" default="" label="" description="" />
        <param name="template" type="text" default="#n is the number you need." label="Template" description="TEMPLATE" />
    </params>

To do: To show a list of the latest stories from your site/URL/domain using the Digg API.

Solution:

The following PHP code will display the latest 20 stories from the domain of your choice. Thanks a heap to Web Cash’s entry on grabbing a random Digg story as well as the Digg Story API which helped with this code.

<?php
//  Takes an array of arguments and returns a query string
//  Each parameter's name is its key in the array
function buildQuery ($args) {
  $query = '?';
  foreach ($args as $key => $val) {
    if ( $query != '?' )
      $query .= '&';

    $query .= $key . '=' . urlencode($val);
  }

  return $query;
}

// Digg specifies that user agent must be set
ini_set('user_agent', 'My domain stories/1.0');

$baseurl = 'http://services.digg.com';
$endpoint = '/stories';
$url = $baseurl . $endpoint;
// Number of stories to display
$numberStories = 20;
// Your domain of choice - CHANGE THIS
$domainName = 'your.domain.com'; 

//  Parameters to fetch latest articles
$params = array();
$params['appkey'] = 'http://' . $domainName;
$params['domain'] = $domainName;
$params['type'] = 'xml';

$params['count'] = '' . $numberStories;
// The following displays the newest items first
// This can be changed using the parameters in the Digg API
$params['sort'] = 'submit_date-desc'; 

//  Reuse the $url created above
$query = buildQuery($params);
$reqUrl = $url . $query;

// Display the URL. Uncomment for troubleshooting.
// echo $reqUrl . "\n";

$xml = simplexml_load_file($reqUrl);

//  Output the stories
for ($i=0; $i<$numberStories;$i++) {
  $numberDiggs = intval($xml->story[$i]['diggs']);
  echo '<p>';
  echo '<h2><a href="' . $xml->story[$i]['href'] . '">'
    . $xml->story[$i]->title . '</a></h2>';

  // Number of Diggs
  echo '<b>Diggs: ' . $xml->story[$i]['diggs'] . ' ' ;
  // If you don't have an image for number of diggs,
  // then uncomment the following line
  for ($j=0; $j<$numberDiggs; $j++) echo '<img src="digg.gif"> ';
  echo '</b><br />';

  echo 'Date: ' . date('m-d-Y, H:i:s', (int) $xml->story[$i]['submit_date']) . '<br />';
  echo 'Link: <a href="' . $xml->story[$i]['link'] . '">'
    . $xml->story[$i]['link'] . '</a><br />';
  echo 'Topic: ' . $xml->story[$i]->topic['name'] . '<br />';
  echo 'Container: ' . $xml->story[$i]->container['name'] . '<br />';
  echo 'Desc: ' . $xml->story[$i]->description . "</p>\n";
}
?>

Request: The excellent Gallery2 Bridge component/module for Joomla has one “shortcoming”: it points to the embedded Joomla component. Some applications/websites will require the Bridge’s functionality to embed the Gallery, but will want to link to Gallery2 and not the embedded component.

Solution:

The URL link is created using the $baseUrl variable in /components/com_gallery2/init.inc.

At around line 83 of the Gallery2 Bridge component, there are the statements that assign the link URL:

/* build url according to our current Itemid and our ItemidList */
if(!empty($ItemidList) && in_array($Itemid, $ItemidList)){
        $baseUrl = 'index.php?option=com_gallery2&Itemid='.$Itemid;
} else if(!empty($ItemidList)){
        $baseUrl = 'index.php?option=com_gallery2&Itemid='.(int) $ItemidList[0];
} else {
        $baseUrl = 'index.php?option=com_gallery2&Itemid=99999999';
}

Right after this, add one statement to specify the URL of the actual Gallery2 site:

/* $g2Uri is specified earlier in the code */
$baseUrl = $g2Uri;

and that’s it – all Gallery2 Bridge components and modules should now point to the live Gallery2 site.

Thanks to this forum post on vTiger, one additional change needs to be made to the CustomView code in order to get the CURRENTUSER variable to work (I don’t know which versions of vTiger it applies to, but I think to all version of 5.x):

function getRealValues($tablename,$fieldname,$comparator,$value,$datatype)
        {
                if($fieldname == "smownerid" || $fieldname == "inventorymanager")
                {
                        /* HACK - to get current user */
                        global $current_user;
                        if ($value == "CURRENTUSER")
                                $value = $current_user->user_name;
                        /* End HACK */ 

                        $value = $tablename.".".$fieldname.$this->getAdvComparator($comparator,getUserId_Ol($value),$datatype);
                } else if($fieldname == "parentid")

A quick follow up to my previous post Customizing vTiger custom views with dynamic “variables” . There is an easy extension to enable multiple variables to be used in the custom views.

This is the code:

        /* Associative array with list of replacement pairs */
        $dvReplacements = array(
                "yourstring" => $variable,
               //
        );
        /* Replace each of the variables */
        foreach ($dvReplacements as $dvKey=>$dvValue) {
            if (strstr($advfsql,$dvKey))
            {
                $advfsql = str_replace ($dvKey, $dvValue, $advfsql );
            }
        }

For example, say I want to replace the variables SP_CURRENTNAME and SP_TODAY with the username of the logged in user and today’s date, respectively. The code is as follows (I am using “2099-12-31″ as the replacement key, since for dates, vTiger requires you to enter them in date format. So, if I want a custom view to check against today’s date, I enter this value in the date field.)

$dvReplacements = array(
            "CURRENTUSER" => $current_user->user_name,
            "2099-12-31" => date("Y-m-d")
        );
        foreach ($dvReplacements as $dvKey=>$dvValue) {
            if (strstr($advfsql,$dvKey))
            {
                $advfsql = str_replace ($dvKey, $dvValue, $advfsql );
            }
        }