Joomla/PHP: How to inject the content (body) of an other article into an article?

Question

Dear Joomla Community,

I'm working on a little Joomla (3.4.1) system plugin that injects some meta tags into an article. It's working fine so far. Now I'd like to extend the plugin to copy the content of an other article into the article that's processed by the plugin. Is this somehow possible?

To be more precise, what I'm looking for is:

• How can I get the content/body from an other article from inside my plugin?
• How can the content/body then be injected into the current article (i.e. the article the plugin is currently processing)?
• Currently the plugin does all it's work in onBeforeRender(). Is that the right place to read and inject an other article?

Any advice is welcome. Thank you very much!

Answer 1

You can load/print any article by articleId using this code:

<?php
    $articleId = 22; // Your article id here
    $table_plan         =  JTable::getInstance('Content', 'JTable');
    $table_plan_return  = $table_plan->load(array('id'=>$articleId));
    echo $table_plan->introtext;
?>

You can also output the full text using echo $table_plan->fulltext; if your articles contain a Read More separation. However, keep in mind that fulltext is empty if no Read More separator has been added to the text.

---

Update:

In order to replace any article with the given content, you can use onContentPrepare:

public function onContentPrepare($context, &$row, &$params, $page = 0)
    {
        if ($context == "com_content.article") { // run only in article views
            $articleId = 22; // Your article id here
            $table_plan         =  JTable::getInstance('Content', 'JTable');
            $table_plan_return  = $table_plan->load(array('id'=>$articleId));
            $row->text = $table_plan->introtext;
        }
    }
}

You can use the parameters ($context, $row, $params, $page = 0) and if/else-statements to control when and how the articles will be replaced.