A client called us earlier this week and told us that when he logs in to his Joomla website and he checks which users are logged in to the website, he only sees the login date. Given that all his users login nearly every day, just seeing the date wasn’t enough for him. He also wanted to see the time at which these users logged in. He said that previous versions of Joomla displayed the date and the time, but Joomla 3.x did not!
In all fairness, we didn’t notice this issue until the client told us about it. So, we logged in to the backend of his Joomla website and then went to the Extensions -> Module Manager, and then selected Administrator from the left dropdown (directly under Filter), and then searched for the module Logged-in Users (this module is the one responsible for displaying this information). To our disappointment, the module didn’t have a setting to show the time, but rather it only allowed us to change 2 things: 1) how many logged in users can be displayed at once, and 2) whether we wanted to display the username or the name of the last logged in users.
But, at itoctopus, we always find a solution to everything. So, in order to accommodate our client’s request, we opened the file default.php located under the administrator/modules/mod_logged/tmpl and we searched for this line:
<i class="icon-calendar"></i> <?php echo JHtml::_('date', $user->time, JText::_('DATE_FORMAT_LC4')); ?>
(Note: The above line could also be: <i class="icon-calendar"></i> <?php echo JHtml::_('date', $user->time, 'Y-m-d'); ?> in previous versions of Joomla 3).
We then changed it to the following line:
<i class="icon-calendar"></i> <?php echo JHtml::_('date', $user->time, 'Y-m-d H:i:s'); ?>
We checked the website and, unsurprisingly, it was now displaying both the date and the time (to the second!). The problem is solved!
But, are there any caveats?
Well, unfortunately, there is this one small caveat. See, the above is a core modification, which means that if you update your Joomla website, the module may be reverted back to what it was (e.g. displaying only the date, and not the time). In order to avoid that, you will need to override the layout by copying the aforementioned default.php from the administrator/modules/mod_logged/tmpl folder to the administrator/templates/[your-joomla-admin-template/html/mod_logged/ folder and modifying it there. This will ensure that any updates to your Joomla website will not overwrite your changes.
If you want to display the date and the time of the last logged in users on the homescreen of the backend of your Joomla website, then all you need to is to follow our super simple guide above. If you think it’s a bit on the technical side and don’t want to do it yourself, then go ahead and contact us. Our rates are super affordable, our work is super professional, and all of us are super duper friendly!