This plugin allows you to create a 'latest article' URL for each of your categories.
It works by intercepting page requests to addresses matching the specified pattern, and re-routing them to the newest article in the requested category.
Note that it only enables the URL; it does not actually place the links to the latest article URLs on your site; it is up to you to do that separately, eg as menu entries.
- 1.0.0
- 1.0.1 - Oops. Was getting the oldest article instead of the latest.
This is a standard Joomla plugin. Installation is via Joomla's extension manager. As with all plugins, remember that it must also be activated after being installed.
Firstly, set the URL pattern you want for the latest article links. The default value for this is [category]/latest, which should be a good starting point. You may change it though if you wish.
Now simply navigating to http://yoursite.com/mycategory/latest/ will result in the request being redirected to the newest article in the mycategory category.
You may now add menu entries or other links pointing to this URL in order to use your random links.
This plugin was written after searching for an existing one to do the job proved fruitless. The functionality to load the latest article is in Joomla already, but I couldn't find an easy way to create a fixed URL that always goes to the newest article, so I wrote the plugin. It helped that it is similar to another plugin I'd already written for random links.
- Todo: Add caching to the DB query so we don't have to query the content table every time.
- Todo: I've not tested it with nested categories; I doubt it will work correctly.
- Todo: Add more options; eg only featured articles, or a choice of sort orders.
- Caveat: If you have an actual article with a title like
latestthat matches the redirect URL in this plugin, then they may clash. Try to avoid this.
As with all Joomla extensions and Joomla itself, this plugin is licensed under the GPL. The full license document should have been included with the source code.