Connecting to Joomla 1.5 from an external PHP script

Monday, 01 June 2009

Sometimes you need to access Joomla libraries and/or data from an outside script. You may need to sync users with a 3PD application, or maybe you're developing a fresh application, but you're used to Joomla style JTable database manipulation, and JRequest input filtering.

Here's the code to boot Joomla from an external script. Back when J! version was 1.5.7, this script was tested and working with PHP CLI(command line), too. I did not test with 1.5.10 for command line compatibility.

Of course, the JDocument instance is not available, because we do not render anything, we're just initializing the application.

The code sample below includes a simple login check. this login check will work as long as the connector script is hosted under the same directory as Joomla, because it will check cookies using HTTP path from the request URI.

<?php 
 
define( '_JEXEC', 1 );
define( '_VALID_MOS', 1 );
// JPATH_BASE should point to Joomla root directory
// if you app is placed into a subfolder in Joomla root, the path will look like dirname(__FILE__) . '/..'
define( 'JPATH_BASE', realpath(dirname(__FILE__) .'/joomla1510' ) );
define( 'DS', DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR );
 
//as seen on
http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=304&t=263491
 
require_once ( JPATH_BASE .DS.'includes'.DS.'defines.php' );
require_once ( JPATH_BASE .DS.'includes'.DS.'framework.php' );
 
 
 
/**
 * check_joomla_login
 *
 * @return BOOL
 * @author Tudor
 *
 * USAGE EXAMPLE
 * echo (check_joomla_login())?"Logged in" : "Not logged in";
 **/
 
 
function check_joomla_login(){
 
$mainframe =& JFactory::getApplication('site');
$mainframe->initialise();
// print_r($mainframe);
$user
=& JFactory::getUser();
// $session
=& JFactory::getSession();
// debug print
// print_r($user);
// print_r($session);
return ( (int)$user->id==0 )? FALSE:TRUE;
}