Question

How can you edit Joomla’s articles in terminal?

Problem: to know the location where Joomla stores its articles

I tried to find articles unsuccessfully by

locate Masi | xargs -0 grep great 

Answer 1

The articles are stored in the database in a table called jos_content. If you wanted to do a find and replace across them all, open a connection to the database (or use something like phpMyAdmin) and run something like this:

 UPDATE `jos_content`  SET    `introtext` = REPLACE(`introtext`, 'great', 'awesome'),         `fulltext`  = REPLACE(`fulltext`, 'great', 'awesome') 

Edit to help you debug the problem:
You won’t be able to find ‘jos_content’ in your codebase, because of a feature of Joomla which allows you to specify different table prefixes: ‘jos’ is the default prefix. In the code, it’s always written like this: #__content, and the DBO object converts that to ‘jos_content‘ behind the scenes.

However, you don’t need to be looking in your code at all, just the database. You should be able to connect to the database – all the details you need will be in your configuration.php file.

• If you’re using Joomla 1.5, the variables you need are called $host, $user, $password and $db.
• In Joomla 1.0, the variables are named $mosConfig_host, $mosConfig_user, $mosConfig_password and $mosConfig_db

There are a number of ways that you can connect to the database (check with your hosting company if you have phpMyAdmin available: it’s quite easy to use), but to do it from the terminal (substitute in your own variables from above):

$ mysql -h $host -u $user -p$password -D $db 

note that there’s no space between the -p and the password. From there you should be able to run your own SQL, but I would highly recommend making a backup before you do any manual changes.