Check if Content exists

Question

I have this piece of code in my template:

<article id="content">
    <section id="mid">
        <jdoc:include type="component" />
    </section>
</article>

which displays the content of my site.

I know there is a way to check if a module exists with $this->countModules('mymodulename') but is it possible to check if content exists?

So I only want to output #content and #mid if actual content exists in the respective article. So far I get the empty html tags displayed If I dont have any content in the article.

Answer 1

I'd agree with comments, best to maybe un-publish empty articles.

Also there is one possible flaw in this plan, and that is the assumption that the component being called is com_content with a single article. What if the page the menu item points to is not com_content, or if it is a blog view of com_content? In those instances you wont have a single article id.

These thoughts aside, you could do this with the following code...

# get the app object, you may already be doing this in your code
$app = JFactory::getApplication();
# get the article id
$article_id = $app->input->get('id');
# check we have one
if ($article_id) {
    # load the JTableContent object
    $article = JTable::getInstance('content');
    $article->load($article_id);
    # use these for debug
    echo $article->get('title');
    echo $article->get('introtext');
    if ( strlen($article->get('introtext') ) ) {
        echo "we have content :)";
        ?>
        <article id="content">
            <section id="mid">
                <jdoc:include type="component" />
            </section>
        </article>        
        <?php
    } else {
        echo "we have no content :( ";

    }    
}

This uses the Joomla's JTableContent, see https://docs.joomla.org/Creating_content_using_JTableContent