Great question dandytink. There are 2 main ways to approach this. Take your pick...

1 - If you "echo" anything inside the PHP box in MetaMod, that content appears in a new module of its own. Therefore if you want to dynamically create the HTML for a link to an article, then you can do it inside the MetaMod and it will appear as a module. Therefore you don't need to create any other modules at all. This works really well if you are simply creating some simple HTML with a dynamic link inside.

See Include PHP code directly in MetaMod for details on how to do this, and Include HTML directly in MetaMod for a simpler syntax for including HTML into MetaMod.

2 - If you want to include a more complex module that you can't recreate yourself in PHP (as above), then you may be able to use the following technique.

MetaMod is able to dynamically control the input parameters of other modules. With MetaModPro, you can control ANY module on the page, even if it's not inside MetaMod. With standard MetaMod, you can only control the parameters of modules included directly inside the MetaMod.

So, if you have some sort of module where you have to set the article to be displayed as a parameter of the module itself, then you can get MetaMod to dynamically change it. (this may be hypothetical - I am imagining a module where you have to pick the article that it has to link to, when you set up the module).

In that case, in the MetaMod you could do the following:

$mod_to_include = 101;
$changes->mod($mod_to_include)->setParam("article_id",53);
return $mod_to_include;

This assumes that module 101 has a parameter called "article_id" which controls which article it's going to display. MetaMod can change this dynamically before the module is rendered.


OK, in both these scenarios you are still going to have to work out how to tell MetaMod which article you are going to be featuring. Have you decided on that yet? Is it going to be random (generated each day/week) or are you going to be setting up a schedule for it?

Let's assume you want to make a schedule to change it every week.

$week_number = date("W"); // ISO-8601 week number, starting from 0
$articles = array(44,204,3212,22,55,56,57,58,...... 52 of these altogether...);
$article_id = $articles[$week_number];

... then you use one of the techniques above to use $article_id to link to the article.

Hope that gets you started,
Cheers,
Stephen

Both methods are designed to avoid having to create 52 or 365 modules!!!

The question for you is though, what sort of module did you have in mind for the one that displays the links to other articles on the site? Were you going to create something with the "Custom HTML" module, or was there some other module, either built-in Joomla or 3rd-party, that you were thinking of using?

Assuming you were going to create Custom HTML modules, then you could instead just use MetaMod to construct the HTML, and not even use it to "pull in" other modules.

To expand the previous code:

$week_number = date("W"); // ISO-8601 week number, starting from 0 

$articles = array(44,204,3212,22,55,56,57,58,...... 52 of these altogether...); 

$article_id = @$articles[$week_number];

if ($article_id != null) {

  $url = "index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=" . $article_id;

  echo "<h3>Article of the week</h3>";

  echo '<a href="' . $url . '">Read more...</a>';

}

Just to be clear, this recipe does not pull in any external modules - it just creates some basic output which gets formed into a module.

Hope that helps,
Stephen

It would be a "Custom HTML" module.

Sure:

$week_number = date("W"); // ISO-8601 week number, starting from 0
if ($week_number == 7) return 123;
if ($week_number == 42) return 125;


That's all there is to it!