It’s taken a good part of an hour trying to find how to disable the administrator or front end template for Joomla.
So I thought I’d just make a post in an effort to turn this frustrated energy into something positive.

To display only the contents of the view on the page without being framed by a template, the tmpl variable needs to be set to “component”.

Something along the lines of having the following snippet in the controller method:
JRequest::setVar(‘tmpl’, ‘component’);

Either that, or adding “&tmpl=component” to the URL.

I remember doing it before, however it’s been a while.

All attempts at searching on how to do the above proved frustratingly impossible as the organic search results for google are filled with people asking how to “disable legacy” modes, “templates”, “modules”, “plugins”, how to make your joomla admin panel rock(!!!!) – not what I was looking for!

Anyway, it’s a rather simple, but not particulary obvious thing – I had to track down the code which I had written over 6 months ago to track that snippet down.

Hope this helps other Joomla! component developers

Recently, I had to upload an archive to a server which did not allow ssh. For files that I need to transfer, I just package them up in a neat archive and transfer the archive file via scp. Not having ssh access however, I uploaded the archive file via ftp and created a script which extracts the file the file looks like the following:

<?php
#extractarchive.php
echo `tar -xvfz somearchive.tar.gz`;
?>

Upon loading up “extractarchive.php”, I can see the output of the tar command through the browser. I did this by using the echo function on the backticked command line – this is not necessary for the backticked command to be executed by php.

Of course, the PHP file will need to have the necessary permissions to execute commands and as always, proceed with caution. I myself do not like doing things this way, I’ve used it in the past as a last resort. But if you ever need to do something like this, at least you know that this can be done with PHP.