I want to adapt my tags result page (default_items.php) so that instead of only showing the articles title it also shows the core article introduction as shown on a category blog page (blog.php).
I thought I'd do this using overrides by copying the code that outputs the article introduction (round about line 82)
<?php
$this->item = &$item;
echo $this->loadTemplate('item');
?>
into the default_items.php file.
All I get is the following error 500 - Layout default_item not found.
Does anyone know how to do this/what the problem is with my approach? Do I just need to define the variables in the default_items.php?
I'm using Joomla 3.2
If I understand you correctly, you have overridden the tag view ( /components/com_tags/views/tag/tmpl/ ). You are in the default_item.php - file in this override, and from here you are calling
<?php
$this->item = &$item;
echo $this->loadTemplate('item');
?>
What Joomla does now is to try to load i file default_item_item.php. Since this file does not exist on the path, (the path includes /components/com_tags/views/tag/tmpl, and your override /templates/yourtemplate/html/com_tags/tag ) a 500-error is thrown.
What you should do is to se what data is loaded in the items. Try
<?php
print_r($this->item);
?>
This will show whatever data is available in the current view (you could also try print_r($this) to see if there are other interesting variables in the current view object that you would like to use. )
If the data you need ( the introtext? ) is not available in $this->item, then there are a couple of solutions to load more data:
The procedure to load the data is similar in both occations. Tell me if you need more help with it...
regards Jonas