Hi Hector,

you are right, the original post was for a Joomla 1.5 install. I've done some updating so it can work on J2.5, though I have not been able to test the part of it that detects the uddeIM database. Try this however: (this requires the full version of Chameleon for Joomla 2.5)

$menuid = XXX; // replace XXX with the id of the menu item to change 



$udduserid = $user->id; 

$uddsql="SEL" . "ECT count(a.id) FROM #_" . "_uddeim AS a WHERE `a`.`delayed`=0 AND a.totrash=0 AND a.toread=0 AND a.toid=".(int)$udduserid; 



$db->setQuery($uddsql); 

$uddresult=(int)$db->loadResult(); 

$message = "Private Messages"; 

if ($uddresult > 0) $message .= " ($uddresult new)"; 



$allmenus = JFactory::getApplication()->getMenu();            

$rProperty = new ReflectionProperty($allmenus, '_items');

$rProperty->setAccessible(true);

$items = $rProperty->getValue($allmenus);

$items[$menuid]->title = $message;

Excellent - glad that worked for you. This is quite a powerful technique. [wondering out loud if this would be a candidate for a Chameleon "action": to change a particular menu item name. But exactly what kind of options to provide, I don't know]

Thanks for reporting back,
Stephen

Yes, as always that's the predicament. A simple text rename would be one thing, but it would not have helped in your case as you needed a very specific value from the database to populate it with, and then only if it was >0. So PHP is really the easiest way to implement it, but it's not very user friendly.

Oh well. At least we made it do exactly what you wanted.

Pardon me it's working.

Can I display a red dot as well to indicate new/unread mesages?

Hi Maranatha,

In general, to achieve the type of results you are looking for, you will be looking for ways to affect the HTML and CSS of the page. One approach would be to identify from the HTML output of the page, the exact HTML that your menu item contains. e.g. it may look like:

<li class="item-444"><a href="/sample-sites" >Sample Sites</a></li>

So, you could use the find-and-replace action in Chameleon to search for:

<li class="item-444">

and replace it with:

<li class="item-444"><span style="color:red">&bull;</span>&nbsp;

(obviously, you only want to do that on the pages where you are doing the original action of changing the menu item text, so do that in your existing rule)

If you want to change the background colour of the menu tab you'll need to investigate what CSS is currently applied to that menu tab (will be different for every template). Then in the succeed action you could output some CSS code to target that tab. For the example above it may be as simple as the following:

li.item-444 {background-color:red;}

Hope that helps,
Stephen