Template -> what does mosCountModules do?

[njcallen]

Hi,

Just a quick question. While looking through a couple of the templates that I have, they use the function mosCountModules. What does this function do?

For example:

if (mosCountModules( "left" ) + mosCountModules( "user1" ) > 0) {

What does that line evaluate?

Cheers,

Nathan

[Riba]

It checks if there are any modules configured to display in the particular area of the site on locations user1 and user2, and if there aren't any it won't put the empty space where they are supposed to be. There was a good example what happens when you don't use this function on www.rsdev.nl, but they fixed it
Anyway, if you just configure your modules not to show in a specific area you will get empty spaces, if you use mosCountModules() to check if there are any modules to be displayed, you can skip the html stuff that will draw the module 'boxes'. Hope this makes sense.

[makinations]

I believe it counts how many Modules are set to display on the left or right or top or bottom. You can use this information to display a header of some sort or to appropriately construct a box (or whatever) around a menu.

That specific line would check if there were any items set to display on the left or in the user1 area.

(My understanding could be a little off. I only started playing with Mambo a couple weeks ago.)

[rbnz]

It returns 1 or 0 depending on if there are published modules in the section indicated in the backets;

mosCountModules('left') will return 0 if there are no modules set to the 'left' position in the module manager that are published. It will return 1 if there are 1 or more published as 'left'.

I'm thinking of advancing this on my own site to actually count the modules, or at least make some other function that counts the modules that are registered or not.

Issues I've found are the inability of joomla to allow a registered/public distinction that shows or hides modules depending if users are logged in or not, for say a registration promotion image, pointless for a user to see if they're already registered