Taking baby steps - $database $my

I am studying several plugins and php simultaneously. I am getting by. I am curious.

Sometimes $database and $my are used and sometimes just $database.

What do they variable stand for and what do they do in the overall scheme of things?

Joomla documentation is the best place to find more details.

$my is a joomla user object of the current user.

$database is a joomla database object which can be used to execute database queries.

api.joomla.org describes these in detail.


mikko

Hey thanks! I did look at the api but i thought it was only relevant to 1.5

Ill check it out again. I guess I am trying to figure out when someone would use $my and when they would not need it.

You need $my only when the thing that you display depends on the user. Even if the api is for joomla 1.5, $database and $my seem to be the same. (If they weren't, Joomla would break a lot of components)

mikko

if you code in a function you'd wanna globalise those variables with 'global $my, $database;', else you dont need to globalise them because they will be already available inside any joomla component.

then you can just grab the current userid or gid or name with

$my->username;
$my->id;
$my->gid;

and ofcourse with this info you can do a lot of fun stuff in your component

Thanks.

I just note that the Author/articles tab does not use the global $my.

I had thought before reading this that I would need $my to display only my articles.