The place here module for Joomla 1.5x choked at some plugins. After I tried to track the issue for a couple of days without getting anywhere I decided to actually read the error messages PHP spat out in strict mode and behold! I forgot to pass a parameter to the function that triggered the plugins. I guess this will resolve most problems with plugins within module content.

I fixed some small bugs in the place here module that threw notices (not errors, stuff like undefined array indexes etc). And on behalf of two commenters I added some small stuff:

There is a new template “titles only” which, as you might guess, shows only the titles of the articles; you can enable the “link title”, “show create date” and/or “show modify date” parameters, most of the other formatting settings are ignored.

I have to say from a performance point of view this is not a good solution, since the module will still pull _all_ of the article information from the database only to disregard most of it in the template, but it might be useful if you have mod_placehere anyway and do want to install yet another module.

Maybe I should provide a way to build you own templates for the module from within Joomla (in fact I have a pretty good idea how to do it but at the moment I shy away from the effort).

The other change relates to the “show frontpage item” setting. There is a new setting (directly beneath) called “Flip Frontpage setting”, that applies the Frontpage setting to the non-frontpage Items.

Yes, I knew you wouldn’t understand this, so here’s how it works: If you set “Show Frontpage Items” to “show” all articles will show. If you set “Show Frontpage Items” to “hide” the articles that have the “show on frontpage” flag (in the article parameters) will not show. if you set “Show Frontpage Items” to “hide” _and_ set “Flip Frontpage Item Setting” to “yes” then only the frontpage items will show.

Come to think of it this might not be the most intuitive way to do things, but I thought it was a good idea at the time and who am I to contradict a clever lad like me.

This has been tested with J! 1.5.2 in PHP 5.2/Windows/Apache. For the download page click here or look in the sidebar for “Module for 1.5 (new).

Adam Wallner pointed out to me a bug in the place here modules HTML output. Since that potentially could wreak havoc on your layout and in any case invalidates your HTML I recommend that you either upgrade, overwrite the helperhtml-File with the corrected file from the most recent version or fix the problem manually.

The error is in modules/mod_placehere/helperhtml.php in line 32.

echo ‘<td valign=”top” colspan=”‘ . $num_of_cols . ‘” class=”mod_placehere_leading”>’ . $rows[$i] . ‘</div>’;

should be:

echo ‘<td valign=”top” colspan=”‘ . $num_of_cols . ‘” class=”mod_placehere_leading”>’ . $rows[$i] . ‘</td>’;

(Mind the wraps, this is supposed to be one line). While at it you could remove the “valign-attribute” and set vertical align via your CSS-File.

Beez is the accessible and tableless template that is bundled with J!1.5. Beez is the brainchild of Angie Radtke and Robert Deutz and is a phantastic piece of work – for those who need to built WAI/508/BITV compliant websites Joomla would be completly useless without Beez ( a problem that has plagued me with previous versions of J!).

The place here module now offers limited support for Beez. “Limited” in that case means a) the module doesn’t automtically pick up your choice of template, instead you need to set it in the module parameters and b) this hasn’t been widely tested (in fact in has only been tested on my home machine with Apache/PHP 5.2 and J!1.5.2) so there possibly will be bugs.

-> Download Page

After a support request I’m wondering if it’s worth to go the trouble and write another version of the content item module for Joomla 1.0.x, one that supports tableless output, allows to disable unwanted mambots and makes perhaps another try at solving the itemid-issue (the current fix doesn’t work with SEF-Urls). This makes only sense if 1.0.x will still be used in fresh installs despite the fact that 1.5.1 is available (I’m not sure how many users come back to fetch upgraded versions for existing sites).

So, what do you think?  Would you care for an improved version, even if it will take to early April before I could finish it? Please comment.

A number of people submitted questions to the FAQ-Sections and are waiting (or not waiting anymore) for an answer – unfortunately the FAQ section got completely overrun by spammers. I think by now I have thrown out most of the spam, and quite propably a number of legitimate questions, too. I’ll try and answer the 25 or so questions that are left, but frankly I don’t know some of the answers myself.

Also, if you want a problem fixed and I ask for more information  please please do provide a follow up, or else I won’t be able to help.

Until recently the ‘place here’ module didn’t work with static content. John Woelfel sent in a patch for that, which is now integrated in the latest download (see sidebar). Thank you, John!

Joomla 1.5 has finally arrived and so I guess I should put a bit more effort into the 1.5 module – so far most bug reports and feature request have been for the “contentitem module”, but I expect that will change soon.

While I’m willing to honour every feature request I possibly can I hate unnecssary efforts, so I do not want to include features nobody uses. The content item module has a feature called “merge items” that allows to display multiple content items as one, so you can print or pdf (can I use “pdf” as a verb?) multiple items in one go. I built this for the guy on whose request I originally wrote the module, but I’m not sure how many people actually use this.

The “place here”-module so far misses the merge-option. I would be interested in your opinion – do you think this is an important feature, or just a nice-to-have (and other features should be other included first), or is this completely useless?

I didn’t really intend to make any more changes to the content item module for Joomla 1.0.x because, frankly, the code is less than elegant and the best way to improve it would be to rewrite it from scratch (on the other hand it works, so why bother). Still I implemented a suggestion from the comments, in part because it allowed me to get rid of a large swath of code in the module.

The change concerns the way content items are ordered when they are displayed in the module. There are now three select boxes with ordering criteria (order by section, category, create date etc) that will be applied one after another, although I expect that not all combinations will make sense.

This is one of the few times that a new version is not fully compatible with previous versions; you can still overwrite the files with the new versions, but you have to re-enter the ordering information in the module parameters before thing will work properly. Both the new and old versions are available at the download page (see left sidebar).