One of Joomla biggest problems (and one the reasons I’m slowly moving away from Joomla) is that there is only one content type. If you need anything else than a basic article you have to find, or write, an extension – not the most flexible way to handle content.
Wordpress, which in it’s later incarnations works pretty well as a CMS solved a similar problem with a mechanism called “custom fields”. For any article you can store additional info as key/value pair in the database with the post id as an identifier. If you use a plugin like the fantastic “more fields“-plugin you can even define arbitrary content types with additional editor fields, dropdowns etc.
I wonder if there is something similar for Joomla. I found two Summer of Code-Projects for custom content types that both seem to go nowhere (come to think of it, I can’t remember any Joomla related SOC project that produced a stable extension) and there is pages-and-items which, judging by the raving reviews, seems to be a fantastic piece of software but which apparently breaks with the standard Joomla interface and introduces it’s own page-tree view (not a disadvantage of course, it just seems it’s a lot more than I need).
I think it’s strange that Joomla did not introduce a custom fields mechanism with 1.5 – after all, the necessary infrastructure with hooks and triggers is already in place. So it should be possible to insert custom fields in the content manager, save key/value pairs with an onSave trigger and pull them from the database and format them according to a given templat (maybe with a component to create fields and templates?) with a plugin on display.
This seems so straightforward that I can only think that either a (working and mainained) extension like this is already there and I didn’t see it or that items-and-pages is already the best possible solution and there is no need for a more simple extension ( I can exclude the possibility that nobody actually wants custom fields – I know a lot people who do).
I would be quite interested in you opinion on the matter.
Hi Joomla users, if I haven’t given you all the support you deserve than it was because Ive worked to much and didn’t have time for anything else. Now me and my motorbike are visiting the Alps (oh, to see mountains again! – there are no mountains in Brandenburg) and when I’m back (which will be by end of the month) I think I’ll have enough energy to do all the things I promised for the module. See you in 15 days !
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.
I missed the so-called “remake” of The Day the Earth stood Still when it hit a cinema near me. Now that I’ve seen the wretched thing my brain hurts. As far as I can tell the only thing the remake and the original have in common is that both have a guy named Klaatu – apart from that the new movie could as well (and should rather) be called Hyper-Advanced Genocidal Alien Nanobots Want to Kill Everybody – not quite as catchy, but a lot more accurate. In a word, crap (and, admitting to a guilty pleasure, I say that as a Keanu Reeves fan).
In other news, I fixed a few bugs in the place here module, and I’m working on a way to force an Itemid on module links (so you can assign templates and modules to articles linked in the module). It seems to work, but I currently do not understand why it works, so I guess I will test for side effects before I release this.
I still haven’t a clue about the “JHTML Icon not supported” bug that some users have reported, I cannot reproduce that so it’s unlikely I will be able to fix that.
Some settings of the placehere module are somewhat esoteric and produce unexpected results (unexpected by you, not by me), not because there is something wrong with the module but because of Joomlas strange and idiosyncratic ways when it comes to organising the way pages are displayed. I won’t go into any detail but will shortly explain an option that will cause problems unless you know what you are doing, and you do not know what you are doing because I haven’t provided any documentation.
I’m talking about the setting “link to category” in the module settings. If this is activated, and you have linked titles or display readmore-links will not link to the article pages but to the category page (blog layout page) of the category for this article. That is, it will do if you have a menu link for the category page. If not the setting will screw up the links, even more so if you’re using SEF-Urls. This is not an error with the module code (if anything it is a design flaw in Joomla), it’s expected behaviour (expected by me, not by you) and doesn’t require fixing or workarounds. Simply switch of this option if you do not have a category blog page and the module will work fine.
Apparently a few users of the mod_placehere module get this error message:
* JHTMLicon not supported. File not found
I cannot reproduce this (using Joomla 1.5.9 on Windows Vista/Apache 2/PHP 5 and mod_placehere version 1.2.2), but I do not simply want to ignore the issue, so if you get this error on your site please contact me with version information of your software.
It’s been quite a while since I posted something, and I’m long overdue with some necessary bugfixes – but I’m terribly busy at the moment, and will be for the next eight or ten days so there wont be much happening on this blog for the time being.
If you came here for the Joomla modules (and undoubtly you did) please use the correct downloads for the respective Joomla versions (I get a lot of mail from people who installed the wrong module for their J! installation and wondered why it didn’t work; I guess I have to redesign this website at some point).
“Contentitem Module” for Joomla 1.0.x
“Place here Module” for Joomla 1.5.x (v 1.2.2)
I’m not so sure this is a good book. The blurb says “community experience distilled” – I think it could have used some more distilling.
“Mastering Joomla! 1.5″ by James Kennard is an introduction to extension- and framework developement with the 1.5 branch of Joomla. In twelve chapters it covers component, module and plugin design, the Joomla HTML library, templates, error handling and web services with J!.
According to the subtitle this is a “professionals guide” and indeed you need to be familiar with Joomla and know something about OOP in PHP to put the book to good use. Problem is, if you’re a professional, or a not-quite-professional with some patience and an internet connection you might as well save the money. It’s not like you get much more out of the book than you can have for free from the Joomla documentation pages.
The book is a nice-to-have for people like me who prefer paper and read programming books in the bathtub subway, but if you think some 35 Euro should entitle you to some more information than you can get for free in the web then you might want to avoid it [1].
- But then you might want to buy it to support the author of a potentially useful extension, especially since he donates a part of the proceeds to the Joomla project
Version 1.2.1 of the placehere module did not work for some people – it would not show new articles. That’s because I had introduced a stupid error in the sql query that messed with the timezone settings. This is fixed in the latest version.
Also I added a template called “beez with article parameters”. That’s a tableless template that ignores the paramaters from the module settings pane (pdf+mail icons etc) and uses those from the article manager or from the article itself. Please note that the included templates are more or less suggestions, with basic HTML you can build you own (leave the stuff inside the php tags alone and change the surrounding HTML). If youve done something clever with a template I’ll be happy to include it in the ‘official’ release of the module.
I also changed the default values for some module parameters to more sensible values.
If you have a previous version of the module installed it will be enough to overwrite the files to update (better yet delete the old files and upload the new ones).
Click here to go to the download page
The place here-module version 1.2.1 didn’t quite work for some people and while I suspected it might be some simple problem I had no idea what actually was going on. It turned out, as it is often the case, that I was being stupid.
Between the previous and current version I had changed the sql query in the module to avoid a problem with date calculations that was not originally caused by my code (so if with future versions you get an error message that involves the words “JFactory::getDate()” please note that I won’t be able to help you). As a result the query failed (unless your server happened to be somewhere in my timezone).
I’m working on some items from the feature requests, so I haven’t released a new version yet, but be assured that there will be a patched version by the end of the week.
