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/

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.

Keywan Ghadami (who has not given his web adress, so instead I link to the project he’s working on – studieren-ohne-grenzen.org) has added a “related article”-feature to the place here module which has found with very little modifications it’s way in the “official” release. That’s how it works:

Related articles

If a) the module is set to display articles; b) no article ids are given; “show related” is set to “yes” (default); and site visitors look at an article page (not an blog or component page) then related articles are displayed. This is at the moment a very basic implementation – relationship between  articles is determined by meta-keyword(s), if at least one keyword is the same for both articles the articles are related.

Edit Button

There is now an edit button in the frontend  (for logged in users with proper permissions).

Start display with an offset

There is a new parameter “offset”. If for example you set the module to display a category with ten articles and set the offset to 5 the module will display articles six to ten from the category (unless you limited the display further with the “number of items displayed” parameter).

General Bugfixes

The sql query used a Joomla function to determine the current date. As long as J! is Mysql only I replaced this with the simpler NOW() function from MySql (since this was easier than to look up how Joomla date functions actually work and why they gave wrong results in the module).  The “gallery mode” displayed pictures from the main content even when disabled, I fixed that, too.

Version Number

Since there is a new major feature I set the version number to 1.2.1. This has been quite thoroughly tested on Vista/Apache/PHP 5.2 so I don’t expect any major bugs (knock on wood), but if anything doesn’t work, well, you know where to find me.