Module to show selected articles in frontend with links to article page

Question

I am writing a module to allow admins to select upto 3 different articles (taken from Joomla Content) to show in the frontend of a site.

I want to show the article title and the intro image, along with a link on both of them to the article.

I have written the following in the module XML file, which shows the article list in the module backend:

<fields name="params">
    <fieldset name="basic">
        <field
            name="article_title_1"
            type="sql"
            default="10"
            label="Select an article"
            query="SELECT id, title FROM #__content"
            value_field="title">
            <option value="">Please select your option</option>
        </field>
    </fieldset>
</fields>

But in my default.php file, when I use the following

<?php echo $params->get('article_title_1') ; ?>

This only shows the article ID, and not the title.

Answer 1

Firstly, I'll start off with a side note. I'm assuming you're doing this in Joomla 3.6, which is fine, but I tested it in Joomla 3.7 and it returns a PHP error, unless you specific value_field="title", so be sure you use this instead:

<field
    name="article_title_1"
    type="sql"
    default="10"
    label="Select an article"
    query="SELECT id, title FROM #__content"
    key_field="id"
    value_field="title"
/>

The query itself will provide you a dropdown list of articles, however the <option> values will be the ID of the article, hence why echo $params->get('article_title_1'); only gives you the ID.

You can then use the following to get the title and intro image:

$id      = $params->get('article_title_1');
$article = JControllerLegacy::getInstance('Content')->getModel('Article')->getItem($id);
$image   = json_decode($article->images);

echo '<a href="' . JRoute::_('index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=' . $id) . '">' . $article->title . '</a>';

if ($image !== null)
{
    echo '<img src="' . $image->image_intro . '" alt="">';
}

Hope this helps