I want to create a module that shows the content of an article

Question

I want to create a custom module that shows the content of an article, I need to know two things:

1) What form field should I use in order to select the article that I want to use from the backend?. I've checked this : https://docs.joomla.org/Standard_form_field_and_parameter_types but I still don't know which should I use

2) How can I retreive the article in my main php?, maybe this is related to the form field in the above question

Thanks

Answer 1

There is not a standard form field for articles, but there is the SQL field which allows querying the database and returns a dropdown list with the results, which could be sufficient for a simple implementation.

There is a really helpful documentation page for it with many examples: https://docs.joomla.org/SQL_form_field_type

Example XML field definition:

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

Then later in your module, you will have the articleid by the module's parameters. You can load the article like so:

$article_id = $params->get('articleid');
$article = JTable::getInstance("content");
$article->load($article_id);

//var_dump($article); 
//this is the whole article object you have loaded.

// You can echo properties like so:
echo $article->title;
echo $article->introtext;