How to find the URL of a blog item in blog category view

Question

I am doing a category blog override. As part of that I require the blog item URL. Not the current URL, which I can get, the read more URL of the blog.

I tried to create a JLayout override, and strip everything except the URL, but that hasn't worked. I get the error:

Cannot use object of type stdClass as array

I'm not much of a programmer, but I'm a bit confused as to why this won't work but it will for a normal JLayout. All I did was remove some stuff.

Answer 1

I found a better way of doing this.

<a href="
    <?php echo 
        JRoute::_(ContentHelperRoute::getArticleRoute($this->item->slug, 
                    $this->item->catid, $this->item->language)); 
    ?>
">Learn More</a>

Answer 2

I found another even better way of doing this.

<?php echo $item->link; ?>

Answer 3

I worked out how to do this. There is probably a MUCH better way, but this is how I did it.

Create my JLayout override

First of all, I went to my Joomla! site. I went to layouts/joomla/content/blog_style_default_item_title.php

I resaved that file in a new location:

templates/YOUR_TEMPLATES_NAME/html/layouts/joomla/content/

I renamed it, blog_style_default_URL.php

Edit the new JLayout override

Now, I can go into this new layout file, strip the <h2> and the <a> leaving just the URL. In this instance, I know that I will always have linked titles, so I can remove the if statement too. I could probably strip everything and just leave:

<?php echo 
    JRoute::_(ContentHelperRoute::getArticleRoute($displayData->slug, 
    $displayData->catid, $displayData->language)); 
?>

Create my HTML override, and call my JLayout

Now I create my HTML override (I won't cover how to do that), in my blog override, blog_item.php, I call the layout. JLayoutHelper::render('joomla.content.blog_style_default_item_url', $this->item);

That gives me my url, but it only provides index.php/21-my-blog-item.php

Find the Base URL and append it

We need the base url too. So I use:

<?php echo 
    $url . JLayoutHelper::render('joomla.content.blog_style_default_item_url', 
    $this->item); 
?>

Remove the trailing slash (if included)

Now I have my url, but I have two slashes. Doh.

www.mywebsite.com//index.php/21-my-blog-item.php

So I used:

<?php 
  // Get the base URL & trip the slash
  $url            = JURI::base();
  $url            = $url = rtrim($url, '/');
?>

Final code

Now in my url I have:

<a href="
    <?php echo 
        $url . JLayoutHelper::render('joomla.content.blog_style_default_item_url', 
        $this->item); 
    ?>" 
</a>