How to Display Your Page Title in Your Template - Joomla! 1.5

Page Titles in Joomla! 1.5

If you've already worked with Joomla! 1.5, you know that page titles are handled differently than in version 1.0. In version 1.0, if you enabled dynamic page titles (see this article for an explanation), each page would have an html title of "Site Name - Page Title". For example, the HTML title of this page is "Cory Webb's How to Joomla! - How to Display Your Page Title in Your Template - Joomla! 1.5", where "Cory Webb's How To Joomla!" is the site name, and "How to Display Your Page Title in Your Template - Joomla! 1.5" is the page title.

In Joomla! 1.5, dynamic page titles are used by default, and the site name is not displayed in the html title. For example, if this site were running in Joomla! 1.5, you could look up in the browser's window header and see that the html title just said "How to Display Your Page Title in Your Template - Joomla! 1.5". That makes things a bit easier in terms of getting access to the page title, but it causes another problem; your site name is not part of the html title. There is an SEF Patch that enables you to modify the HTML title, but I will show you a trick for doing this in your template. Think of this as 2 how-to's in 1.

Accessing Your Page Title from Your Template

There are 2 objects in Joomla! 1.5 that are extremely powerful and extremely useful for doing some advanced tricks in your template. The first object is JFactory, which is basically the gateway for accessing just about anything in the Joomla! API, and the second is JDocument, which gives you access to your document's properties. Your document is usually defined as the HTML output from Joomla!, but it could also be a PDF, XML/RSS, or raw output/text. In this case, we are only concerned with the HTML output.

To access your page title, simply add the following code to the top of your template "index.php" file:

 
<?php
 
$mydoc =& JFactory::getDocument();
$mytitle = $mydoc->getTitle();
 
?>
 

That's it. That's all there is to it. Pretty simple, huh? Now, to display your page title within your template, you simply add the following code anywhere in your template "index.php" file that you wish to display the page title:

 
<?php echo $mytitle; ?>
 

That's all there is to it. Pretty easy.

Modifying Your HTML Title

The next thing we want to do is modify your html title. We will be using the JDocument object that we just accessed. Using this code, you can set the html title of your page:

 
$conf =& JFactory::getConfig();
$sitename = $conf->getValue('config.sitename');
 
$mydoc->setTitle($mytitle.' - '.$sitename);
 

Notice that I used JFactory again to get a copy of the Joomla! configuration, which I then used to get the value of the site name (config.sitename). Then, I used "$mydoc" from the earlier step to set the html title.

Note that this code sets the html title to "Page Title - Site Name". If you want to set it to "Site Name - Page Title", you need to change the setTitle parameter to "$sitename.' - '.$mytitle". In reality, you can set the html title to anything you want, but I personally think "Page Title - Site Name" makes the most sense.

Putting it All Together

Using the following code, you are simultaneously getting dynamic access to your page title and setting the value of your html title:

 
<?php
 
$mydoc =& JFactory::getDocument();
$mytitle = $mydoc->getTitle();
 
$conf =& JFactory::getConfig();
$sitename = $conf->getValue('config.sitename');
 
$mydoc->setTitle($mytitle.' - '.$sitename);
 
?>