Sticky: Joomla Downloads

Filed under: Joomla — Eike @ June 3, 2009 9:22 am

Some people have complained that this site is hard to navigate, and it is (I will redecorate when and if I have time). Since you have come most likely to download the contentitem/placehere – module for Joomla I make a sticky post to the respective download pages.

Joomla 1.0.x- mod_contentitem

http://diebesteallerzeiten.de/blog/joomla-content-item-module/

Joomla 1.5.x mod_placehere (a.k.a mod contentitem for Joomla 1.5)

http://diebesteallerzeiten.de/blog/module-15/

Both pages offer links to current versions (scroll down to the last download link) and previous versions (not recommenend).

You find some info on how to use the 1.5 module here.

    Tati and Dug

    Filed under: Miscellaneous — Eike @ February 8, 2010 4:06 pm

    dougtatismall

      Good News Everybody

      Filed under: Uncategorized — Eike @ January 31, 2010 2:41 pm

      I know that this dates me, but I remember a time when IE6 was actually a top-notch browser – not standards-compliant even by the, as it where, standards ten years ago, but easily the best product on the market [1].

      But IE6 is now long past its’ prime [2]. For years Microsoft let everybody down  by not updating IE to modern standards and when they finally tried IE7 and 8 where so bad that one wonders why they have bothered at all [3]. Actually I read an article that claimed that the market share for IE6 is bigger than that of IE7 and almost rivals that of IE8.

      The best way to make IE6 disappear is not to support it any longer, which I, as a freelancer, am in absolutely no position to do.  But following some other companies now Google drops support for IE6 and there’s hope that when the kraken spits something out as indigestible it will finally go for good, so this is very good news indeed.

      1. Actually the idea behind MSIE was probably to destroy the market. Inconceivable as it seems now Browsers used to be payware before a certain major company started to distribute theirs for free
      2. Wikipedia states that it has been introduced in August 2001
      3. Possibly because they needed to support people who relied on ActiveX-Implentations of one thing or the other

      Oh the irony

      Filed under: Miscellaneous — Eike @ January 19, 2010 2:56 pm

      I found myself furiously nodding in agreement when I read this blogpost from “Anonymous Geek called If You Don’t Date Your Work, It Sucks – I’m mostly looking for technical information on the internet and it’s always annyoing when you have to actually read an article on, say, Javascript before you realize that your favourite web crawler found you an at least ten year old article that discusses the finer points of document.write(). I then headed over to my own blog to bask in the glory of my immaculately formatted post dates when I realised that they were in fact broken; for some reason my Wordpress theme had ignored the date settings. This is fixed now. And now—

      Please always date your posts, it really helps you readers.

        Happy holiday

        Filed under: Miscellaneous — Eike @ December 24, 2009 4:57 pm

        I’ll be offline and unavailable for support until January 2nd 2010. I wish to you all and your families and friends a happy holiday and a happy and successfull new year.

          Finally, some new code (needs testing)

          Filed under: Joomla, Manual — Eike @ December 11, 2009 3:08 pm

          I made some changes and additions to the “Place here”-module (content item module for Joomla 1.5.x); I have tested this with J! 1.5.15 on Win Vista / XAMPP but would welcome feedback from people who tested this on other platforms.

          Changelog:

          Version 1.3.0
          + Renamed “default” template to “table based template”
          (since it’s not the default anymore)
          + Added “order by publishing date”
          + Patched in W. Brockmans change to sort by hits
          + Added integration for tags extension by
          joomlatag.org (module view is filtered by templates tags)
          + You can now enter a range of ids into the id-field

          So there are three minor and two major changes.

          I renamed the default template since it is actually no longer  the default (this means if you upgrade the module and you use the table based template you will need to update the template setting in the module parameters).

          There are some new ordering parameters, partly by courtesy of W. Brockman.

          A more substantial change is some level of integration for the tag extension by Joomlatags.org (apparently not  the same as joomla-tags.com, so do not confuse the two). If you enter a tag or a comma separated list of tags into the “Filter by tags” -field (right beneath the id field) only the articles that are tagged accordingly will show up.

          To save you a bit of typing you can now enter a range of ids into the id field – if you enter something like “1-3,6-9″ it  will be expanded into  “1,2,3,6,7,8,9″. Incidentally this means you can use the module to show all articles with a certain tag – simply enter your tag, set the “type” option to “article” and enter “1-10000000″ (some number that’s larger than your actual number of articles).

          And finally I added a rather crucial sentence to the module description, and that is not all parameters will work with all templates. Selecting articles and ordering them will work no matter what, but everything that has to do with actually displaying stuff (link titles, show icons, show category etc) needs to be supported by the template (you should be okay if  you choose eiter “beez” or “table based”).

          Download page : http://diebesteallerzeiten.de/blog/module-15/

            I’m back, sort of.

            Filed under: Joomla — Eike @ December 6, 2009 10:06 pm

            It’ been quite some time since I last worked on the place here module. Today I rebuilt my testserver, installed a current version of Joomla and started to sort the feature requests from the comments. There is no new code yet, but I will maintain and improve (hopefully) the module for the foreseeable future.

            So if you have made a feature request be assured it is not forgotten and, if technically feasible, will be honoured.

              Praise then Creation unfinished!

              Filed under: Science — Eike @ November 9, 2009 7:12 pm

              No, I have not suddenly fallen among the creationists – the headline is a quote from “The left Hand of Darkness”, a superb novel by Ursula K. LeGuin [1]. So it looks like we need a better word for all of the earth and the planets and the moons and stars.. Oh wait. We have one: It’s Cosmos [2].

              But it is a cosmos unfinished: It was born in the Big Bang – not an explosion, despite the name, since ‘explosion’ means that matter violently expands into the surrounding space. The Big Bang was an expansion – it was when space came into existence. And, as one of my favourite podcasts reminded me some time ago, the process isn’t [3] finished – like they say, the universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding, and that’s a pretty awe-inspiring thought if you ask me.

              And of course that means more room for awesomeness.

              1. It's a strange thing - LeGuin's stories with  rather plausible ideas of time dilation and hermaphroditism are dismissively called  "soft fiction" or "social fiction" while writers like, say, Niven or Pournelle are called 'hard sf' writers while they go on and write about FTL space ships - the idea of Faster Than Light travel is about as scientific as the tooth fairy.
              2. As the Bad Astronomer Phil Plait reminds us, today would be Carl Sagans 75th birthday
              3. And propably never will be.

              Johann Georg Elser (4 January 1903 – 9 April 1945)

              Filed under: shoa — Eike @ November 8, 2009 10:10 pm

              “”This was the noblest Roman of them all.
              All the conspirators, save only he,
              Did that they did in envy of Caesar;
              He only, in a general honest thought
              And common good to all, made one of them.
              His life was gentle, and the elements
              So mixd in him that Nature might stand up
              And say to all the world, This was a man!”

              70 years ago, on 8 November 1939 Georg Elsers assassination attempt on the life of Adolf Hitler failed. Undoubtly had he succeeded he would not be rememberes as a hero [1] but as a madman who killed a great german statesman – after all, the biggest crimes of Hitler and Nazi Germany where still to come. Had Hitler been killed in 1939 history would have, I’m afraid, looked quite favourably upon him.

              Unlike the conspirators of the 20 July plot Elser did not plan for a coup d’état or to take power himself; Elser, who acted all alone, had no illusions that Hitlers assassination could stop the Nazis. He had hoped that after the death of  the top Nazis more moderate elements would rise to the head of the Nazi party.

              More than 60 years after his death Elser was finally recognized – in a ceremony during which a small Else memorial was unveiled – as somebody who ‘did not simply look away” during the “Third Reich”.

              1. Not that he was remembered as a hero in any case; for most of the time Germany preferred to think of him as a mere criminal and some suggested that he was in fact a Nazi himself

              Motorbiking and evolutionary quirks

              Filed under: Miscellaneous — Eike @ October 30, 2009 12:38 am

              Recently I did something stupid – I dropped a motorbike on my foot (not on purpose, of course – this was one of those embarrassing accidents where my foot slipped  in an entirely simple and harmless situation).  When it happend it was immensely painfull. Usually I suffer pain silently, or rather I get on everybodies nerves by telling them in a pathetic little voice how I suffer my pain silently, but this time I screamed for help – completly pointless, since I could see that my friend (whose bike I was riding, actually) was already coming for help as fast a he could. Somehow I seemed convinced that he would come even faster if I would only scream loud enough. It was only after the first shock wore off that I realized I could wriggle my foot free from under the bike. Hadn’t I spent the first minutes after the accident screaming the pain would have ended a lot sooner.

              Now I wonder what’s the point of that reaction. I guess all that adrenaline and stuff served some purpose (maybe to make the pain bearable, altough it certainly didn’t feel that way), but what exactly is the survival value of a response that turns me into a headless chicken with all the wrong instincts [1] ?

              1. I know that some strange people out there do not believe in evolution, but when it comes to discussing theodicies the question is even harder to answer.

              I still ain’t dead, swineflu edition

              Filed under: Joomla, Miscellaneous, Programming — Eike @ October 18, 2009 9:09 pm

              Being ill [1] means that while you have time do do some bits of housekeeping (like updating your blog) you are not actually capable of doing so. After I had finished both the website for a local cinema and the Centrum Judaicum I spent most part of the last week caring for the girlfriend, contracting the girlfriend’s flu and being cared for by the girlfriend. There are much worse ways to spend a week.

              I sometimes wonder if there is a switch in every MS Windows version to make it obsolete as soon as a new version is out. After the last update I cannot send e-mails anymore. Apparently the error code means that some firewall is blocking outgoing mails, although I have no idea why now or why at all or how to fix this. Since I have already checked that Outlook is  allowed to communicate through the firewall (it is) I will now check if it is still illegal to hit Microsoft employees with a mallet (probably yes, I’m afraid) because their stuff is seriously getting on my nerves (and I used to like Windows quite a lot in pre-Vista (and pre-Ribbon as far as Office is concerned) times). I will eventually buy Windows 7, but it feels a lot like throwing good money after bad.

              What else have I done  these days? For one thing I’ve started playing with the symfony framework. This is a much different thing than Joomla or Drupal, both of which claim to be “frameworks” as well and provide APIs to write extensions or are extensible by backend configuration. Symfony introduced me to a mode of PHP developement that is new to me – generating applications on the command line [2]. I’m not yet sure what to think of it – it has a steep learning curve [3] and requires much more control over the server than I usually have (many of my clients are on cheap shared hosting accounts) and a rather recent version of PHP (which, again, is not always available on shared hosting accounts). On the other hand it looks like it could be a timesaver if you actually get fluent in symfony developement.

              And finally for today let’s have a bit of advertising. Yesterday some friends of mine launched Trabayo, a new job exchange platform. The main difference to other such platforms is, of course, that I actually know and like some of the people behind this. If you want to learn something a bit more substantiall about Trabayo you can read their ‘philosophy‘ or visit the main site (all german).

              Enough for today. A number of people have sent enhancements and fixes for the mod_placehere module ( I assume you are here for the module), and I hope that I will finally have a chance to integrate this into the ‘official’ distribution. No promises  this time, but I’ll do my best.

              1. Okay, so it's common cold, not swine flu. But still.
              2. Which keeps crashing. If anybody know how I get rid of the "CLI does not respond" messages please tell me.
              3. Which is actually a flat learning curve. If the x-axis measures time and y-axis measures progress, that is.
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