Someday somebody will write a better implementation of the content item/place here module and people will go there and my fifteen minutes of fame will be over. But at the moment about 130 people per day come here to ignore my various rantings about space and scifi and other stuff and head more or less straight for the download page.
I need to confess something: I do not actually use the module myself. I wrote the first version about one and a half years ago and it was supposed to be a throwaway thingy for a specific, now defunct project. But then people looked for something like this and started asking for features and bugfixes and I invested a bit of time to make it work (as far as possible) for everyone. But keep in mind that I do not use it myself and therefore I do not actively hunt for errors. If something doesn’t work – which happend an number of times in recent weeks, since most of the module code is more than a year old and is sometimes at odds with recent versions of Joomla – I will probably not be aware of it until you tell me. I will fix everything that is possible to fix, but you need to tell me what went wrong (and possibly include your Joomla Version, PHP Version, MySql Version and operating system in the description. And if the error occured after you changed module parameters I should know this, too).
I’m just mentioning this because a user alerted me to an error that turned up when the module is used to display categories (apparently is occurs only with recent Joomla versions) that is so severe that I wonder how people got along with the module so far. This is hopefully fixed now.
The content item module for Joomla 1.5 has been renamed to “Place Here Module” or “mod_placehere” or whatever – the name has been suggested by a user of the module and I think it fits the bill (and frankly I don’t care if it sounds good) – the new name was needed for disambiguation, if not by anybody else then at least by me (I got regularly confused on which version I was working).
I fixed a number of bugs (but didn’t yet add any features) and I hope that it now works better and that the errors I couldn’t reproduce will now somehow be resolved, too. Well bugs… there were a few occasions were I did not (or still do not) understand the new framework – I’m convinced it’s a thing of beauty and everything, but it means that even a trivial thing like the content item module suddenly requires a heavy investment in time and effort which, I am sure, is a sign of progress. Oh well.
New version is at the download page (see sidebar). This has been tested with WinXP/Apache and RC3. Feedback is, as always, welcome.
I received two nearly identical questions about the content item module, one of which I quote here:
Im using the module on the front page in joomla 1. When I press the read more… link it opens the article, but it stays on the front page. So things I have displaying only on the front page are still there, and the breadcrumb system doesnt work.
Since I haven’t had time to look thoroughly into it I haven’t submitted this to the FAQ, but it’s most likely a problem with the changes as per Joomla 1.0.12 in the way itemids are handled. I think Joomla 1.0.13 has a compatibilty backward setting for itemids, so you should try that first if you have the same problem.
UPDATE: My guess was correct and this has been submitted to the FAQ. Alas that means there’s no easy solution for 1.0.12 (which lacks the compatibilty setting), anybody who cannot update from 1.0.12 to 1.0.13 should contact me (I won’t bother to think of a fix unless I’m asked to).
… but not by much, at the weekend I ploughed the meadows with my motorcycle after a bee got caught in my helmet and I proceeded straight where the street made a turn. However this is not among the reasons for a lack of updates in the last week.
The main reason is simply that I’m quite busy with paid work – good for me since it keeps the money rolling in, but I don’t have that much time for fun things.
Another reason is that this was supposed to be largely a site about Joomla programming and as of late I got a little disenchanted with Joomla. My labor of love for these past three years – the holocaust ressource site shoa.de – runs on Joomla, or rather most of the time it doesn’t run. Joomla causes an inexplicably high load on the server (which in turn regularly collapses), user login regularly fails and a structure that allows only for sections and categories has proven to be unsuitable for our purposes, we need subcategories. And don’t even get me started on the trouble the 3rd Party-Components give us. Pretty soon I will have to rebuild the site and this time I will use another software, which inevitably means that my focus will shift away from Joomla – shoa.de has, after all, been the main reason I got involved with Joomla in the first place.
However I will continue to support and (even though it doesn’t look like it at the moment) to develop the content item module, since it seems by now a lot of people depend on it. I generally don’t let people down if I can possibly avoid it.
Thank you to all the people who provided feedback for the 1.5 modules alpha version. It turned out that the alpha has some severe bugs (for some users images don’t show up, some parameter settings are ignored etc) and is therefore for all intents and purposes useless. Even worse, with some of the bugs I have no idea how to fix them (since I can’t even reproduce them). I’m investigating the issues but I feel that I’m pretty much back to square one, so there won’t be much progress in the next days.
A couple of days ago thelist – the mailing list of the evolt web developer community – had a short discussion about javascript libs (like e.g. jquery). Do they help with coding or not – i.e. do they help you to become an actual programmer or are they a simple way to do nifty stuff that you don’t actually understand?
I couldn’t contribute to the discussion, but still I’d like to mention here one of my problems with libraries. I often take over maintenance for sites that have been deserted by their original programmers, and usually when one of these web geniuses spontaneously combusts he burns with him all documentation. One of the sure signs of a web prodigy is that comments in the frontend code usually fail to tell anything useful. Instead I find little essays on why “Javascript sucks”, which is why they have used this amazing library (usually nebulous 0.1 or the promiscuous 0.0.5 pre-alpha) that allows for otherwise unsurmountable tasks like adding a rollover to an image or toggle display of a named element (and even if they used one of the better known scripting frameworks there are still at least a ten or twelve to choose from). So instead of programming in the one language javascript, which I by and by get the hang of (mostly due to Christian Heilmanns excellent book and web site) I suddenly have to look up documentation for a dozen or so libraries. And sometimes I wonder why my predecessors bothered at all to include a couple of hundred kb worth of Javascript when they then decided to rather use some method they’d concocted themself.
This is of course not an argument against libraries – I think by now it would be somewhat insane to built a Rich Interface Application without a javascript framework – but I still have to say that the purpose of libraries is often defeated at my end, when simple Javascript would be much easier to understand and maintain.
My suggestion would be not to use libs for the more mundane tasks but rather small, well documented scripts, never to include a library (or worse, multiple libraries) just because it has one effect that you particularly like and, if you can’t help to use a library then to actually use it and not replace parts of it with your own functions.
And if you are interested in Javascript your really should visit Chris Heilmanns web page wait-till-i.com (it feels a bit strange to advertise for him, since he’s some kind of web guru and I’m a goofball from Berlin, but still). While many people still look at JS as something that is slapped on top of a web page he sees it as a regular programming task, which means that the task at hand gets analyzed step by step before he starts writing code. I tried it and was amazed how much time you can save by taking the long way round.
