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.
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.
“”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”.
Over the weekend I tried to implement a basic custon fields solution for Joomla. There a indeed a few add-ons for custom fields (k2 for example, or jSeblods Content Creation Kit) but they all do way more than I need/want, plus I don’t think they are good enough, interface-wise, for technically inexperienced users.
I just wanted to add a few text fields to an article , depending on the selected category , and have a simple plugin to format them in the frontend. How difficult coud that be? – after all, the necessary infrastructure of events and hooks and triggers is already in place. Or so I thought.
Okay, so it was my own fault, I could have read the documentation more carefully; instead I had read some forum discussions where people made the same wrong assumptions as I did, namely that an onSave event would allow me to do something as soon as an article is saved.
It doesn’t. About the only thing it does is to return a small string of javascript that is somehow needed to store the contents of the WYSIWYG editor field, and it’s useless for anything else. There is no hook or event that allows any interaction with content data when it’s saved. Which made me think.
I started using Joomla – well, actually I started with Mambo 4.5. Then I waited a year or so for the new and improved version (whatever it was to be called), instead Joomla forked of the Mambo project, and I switched. Then I waited for what felt like another two years for Joomla 1.5.x and while I read about the new Codebase with MVC and everything that tied up the developers time for years I have to say I simply do not see where all the effort went. When I look at what I actually can do with the system Joomla is still stone age technology; pretty much all I can do is publish simple articles, provided they don’t need to look particularly nice and one category per article is enough and I don’t need proper user management or workflow or revisions and I can do without comments and trackbacks and all the other newfangled stuff on my “blog” (a misnomer if I’ve ever heard one) layout.
Yes, there are extensions, but Drupal with CCK and the views module could propably replace two-thirds of all Joomla extensions, plus you can do everything via a common interface instead of a plethora of home-grown component interfaces.
So, Joomla was nice as long as there weren’t better alternatives, but when I look at the pace of development it’s always too little, too late. I will watch Joomla so I can maintain my module and retain a level of expertise for those clients who insist on Joomla (if any), but I won’t use it anymore if I can help it and I will not even try to develop any other extensions – why would I, when other systems do anything I need right out of the box.
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.
So I’m in Germany again…. I will probably write a few posts about my holiday, but what I can say right now that it convinced me again of the advantages of a European Union. To be able to travel hence and forth through five countries without having search for your passport at every border, that’s really something (I know this dates me but I can remember times when things haven’t been that easy).
And there where mountains:
I like mountains.
If you are looking for the Joomla Module that used to be hosted at this page please be advised that this is deprecated or at least no longer actively maintained. If for some reason you still need to download the module you’ll find the version for 1.5 (there is no more recent version, although this is reported by some users to work with J! 2.5) here: http://diebesteallerzeiten.de/blog/module-15/. You find some info on how to use the 1.5 module here.
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.
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