Ein deutschsprachiger Ausflug in die Vergangenheit…. der Text ist von 2004, entstanden zum damaligen Out-of-this-world-Kongress. Mit sanfter Befriedigung stelle ich fest dass ich die meisten Aussagen auch heute noch so stehen lassen kann, insofern kann ich ihn ja auch hier veröffentlichen.
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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
In the comment section of a post in the Pharyngula science blog[1] I found an entry where a man rather emphatically stated “If you think that Hitler was democratically elected you should buy a good history book“. I do have a good history book (in fact, I have a lot of good history books), so I feel rather comfortable when I say that, yes, Hitler had been elected democratically.
People who say that Hitler wasn’t really elected are usually germanophiles who search for excuses for crimes of the german people in the “Third Reich” (the argument is that a small undemocratic minority oppressed the good people of germany). But since Pharyngula is an american blog the case here might be a lot less sinister. The idea that Hitler wasn’t elected democratically is probably an allusion to the fact that he[2] never got more than 50% of the votes (th e best result was some 44%). Americans, with their “the winner takes it all”-system tend to forget that you can win a german election without winning a majority.
The problem with this is that, without a majority, you have to form either a coalition with other parties, or form a minority goverment, or both, and in fact that was the problem that had plagued the Republic from the beginning. To put the results into perspective, the 43,9% for the NSDAP in the 1933 election was the best result any party had ever had in the Republic of Weimar from 1919 to 1933[3] (second best was 37,8% for the Social Democrats immediately after WWI)[4]. Governments were habitually formed without any democratic basis at all, so the result of the 1933 election might have looked like a step forward.
It turned out that there is yet another way to govern without a majority – in March 1933 the german parliament passed what is known as „Ermächtigungsgesetz“ (Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich), a law that allowed the Nazi/Deutschnationale Coalition to govern without the consent of the parliament. That this was in fact an unconstitutional law is a mere technicality – it was passed with a vast majority that would have allowed to change the constitution in any case, so the parliament skipped a step[5].
So,since Hitler and the NSDAP had more votes than any other party during the Republic of Weimar and governed on the basis of a law that had been passed by the absolute majority of the parliament is seems reasonable to conclude that he was indeed democratically elected.
The more important point is that this question is not as such relevant. I’m not sure you can blame the german people for electing or not electing Hitler [6] – after all he didn’t went into the election with the promise of perpetrating a holocaust, and his programme was not much more radical or antisemitic than that of some other parties. The pretty much collective crime of the german people[7] was that they supported Hitler and his party even after they had started comitting unspeakable crimes and that a sizable fraction of the population supported him in comitting those crimes.The difficult thing about democracy is that majorities (pluralities)[8] are sometimes wrong and that you have to decide if and when it is your moral duty to follow the wrong decisions many, or when to fight them.
[1] Dang, I can’t seem to find the post I’m refering to – no wonder, Prof. Myers writes more blog posts per month than I do in a year. In the post he was (again) adressing the silly contention that Darwinism inevitably results in genocide (actually it doesn’t).
[2] As a technicality “Hitler” wasn’t elected at all – the Republic of Weimar had a system of proportional representation where citizens elected parties, not persons. In practial terms the NSDAP was in some conservative parts of the electorate probably more a liabilty than an asset to Hitler. The german head of state Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor only after he was reassured that the actual affairs of government would be run by the conservative Deutschnationale (German National) Party.
[3] Sautter, Udo „Deutsche Geschichte seit 1815: Daten, Fakten, Dokumente“ Tübingen 2004, p.166f
[4] Incidentally, counted in percentages the NSDAP had a better democratic legitimation than any party in the Federal Republic of Germany for at last 20 years – the best result in this time was 44,3% for the conservative „Union“ in the 1987 election and as the name suggests even this is a (permanent) coalition of two parties (CDU/CSU). For comparison, the elecorate in the Republic of Weimar was about 45 million voters, in the FRG it’s about 60 million.
[5] To the members of the Weimar parliament such a law looked propably less portentous than to a modern-day democrat; after all there had been already two previous „Ermächtigungsgesetze“ during the term of Friedrich Ebert .
[6] If anything it is strange that people elected a person who had already served a term for high treason.
[7] Yes, I know that phrase won’t make me any friends.
[8] The distinction between a majority and a plurality is much harder to make in german
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.
The latest version of “mod_placehere” (content item module for J!1.5) apparently does not work for a number of people (for production you can still use the previous version), and I have to say that I do not know why. I’ve spent the day with attempts to find the flaw, but didn’t find it.
So if you download the module I would ask you to first try the latest version; if this doesn’t work please write a comment or a mail with your Joomla Version, PHP Version and MySql Version. A Screenshot of your module settings would be nice, too.
Uncategorized content did not work in the latest version of mod_placehere, this is fixed now. However there seems to be another bug (I had two commenters who say that the module did not work for them) that I could not locate or reproduce yet.
Please, don’t be shy – if the module does not work it’s much more likely a bug in the code than an error of yours, there is not much you can do wrong. If you have a live site where the module does not work you can provide me a temporary login via email and I have a look and try to fix the problem (email adress is in the left colum).
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.
I hope you all had a happy holiday.
I made some changes to the “place here module” ( sometimes I think I should find another name). There is now an edit button in the frontend, you can specifiy an offset (so, for example, you can display a category starting with the 5th,7th,nt..h article), the module rows now have a CSS class “even” and “odd” respectively than can be used for “zebra striping” (alternate colors) and I fixed a number of bugs (or so I hope).
However I’m not at home (that is, not at my workplace) and have only a very limited internet connection, so I have no proper way to test all this. So I would ask you out there to do a bit of beta-testing for me.
I especially want to know if the links are correct when the content type is set to “articles” (formerly content items, I changed this to be consistent with J!1.5 terminology) and “link to category” is set to “yes” (and SEO Urls are enabled).
Link is here: mod_placehere_v111_beta
I’m grateful if anybody will test this for me, but you shouldn’t bother yet to update production sites even if it works (since there will be more changes shortly).
Redemanuskript für einen Vortrag im Berliner ‘Ausland’ für die Veranstaltungsreihe “Dein Wort in Gottes Ohr” (dwigo.net). Der Text ist nicht rechtschreibkorrigiert.
Der Abschnitt über “I am Legend” ist weitgehend eine Übersetzung meiner eigenen Rezension hier im Blog. Für die Verwendung der illustrierenden Videoaussschnitte reklamiere ich “Fair use” (lasse mich von den Rechteinhabern aber gegebenfalls auch ohne Rechtsstreit eines anderen überzeugen).