Codelab Blog » Joomla

JFactory::getDate() doesn’t automatically add offset

Tim — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 09:43:50 +0000

By default, calling JFactory::getDate() doesn’t automatically apply the timezone offset. The default date/time is GMT.

By using the following code, you can set the offset from the global joomla configuration file

$thisJApp = &JFactory::getApplication();
$thisJDate = JFactory::getDate();
$thisJDate ->setOffset($thisJApp ->getCfg(‘offset’));
echo $thisJDate->toFormat(“%A %d %b %Y”);
?>

If you want to set the date from a logged in user you can try:

$JUser =& JFactory::getUser();
$JDate = JFactory::getDate();
echo $JDate->toFormat().’
’;
echo ‘offset=’ . $JDate->getOffset() . ‘
’;
$JDate->setOffset($JUser->getParam(‘timezone’));

SimplePie Joomla Proxy Issue

Tim — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:43:50 +0000

The issue I had with a particular joomla site is that I could not load external RSS feeds. The error was “Could not connect to {server}”. RSS Feed load failed. This was caused in the SimplePie.php class around line 6601.

Steps to resolve:

I enabled the cUrl extension in php.ini (running on a IIS platform)

Changed the code around line 6536:

curl_setopt($fp, CURLOPT_PROXY, $ip);
curl_setopt($fp, CURLOPT_PROXYPORT, $port);
curl_setopt($fp, CURLOPT_PROXYUSERPWD, $login . ‘:’ . $passwd);

where $ip is the proxy IP Address, $port is the port and $login:$password is the proxy authentication.

After this, I can load in external RSS feeds! YAY

References:

http://www.phpdig.net/ref/rn11re189.html

Modifying contact component in Joomla issue

Tim — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 02:35:24 +0000

The problem I came across when making a modification to the layout in the Joomla contact component was it wasn’t updating on the website. I even cleared out the cache and it still didn’t work.

It wasn’t until I realized it was because of the template that I was using. Templates can override the layout of Joomla components. These are located under the templates directory structure. Normally they are under template/html/com_contact/contact/default.php (for example, here is the contact component layout).