In the last three days I have received about twenty mails with bug reports, patches and more or less feasible feature requests and suggestions for the place here module. Thank you to you all, this is very much appreciated, it’s just that I haven’t had time yet to integrate all the patches and ideas, I will do so during the next days.
Btw., how many of you have problems with wrong links in the readmore-Link and linked titles ? There is a bug, but doesn’t seem to affect everybody. I’m just curious if there is a pattern.
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
I very much like the german word Tagewerk – it’s a bit of an oldfashioned word (of course that’s why I like it) that literally translates to “a days work”. What it actually means is a man-day, or a billable day, and opposed to that other kind of day (chronological) it has only eight hours, which means that a freelancer like me can work a couple of days per day, provided he doesn’t attach great importance to mundane things like e.g. sleeping, eating or generally recreating.
I worked a number of Tagewerke over the weekend, and the coming week isn’t going to be much better (so still no merge feature for the place here module, I’m too busy). If you have asked a question about the module and haven’t received an answer yet you better ask again, chances are that I forgot about it.
I made a few changes to the module for J!1.5.
- Display of section/category names should now work. They sit in elements with the class of .section and .category respectively if you want to style them with CSS.
- I added a few more ordering options.
- I added an option to disable plugins on the module content
Since the old download page got a little crowded with comments I moved the download to a new page. You find it in the sidebar under the link Module for 1.5 (new), URL is http://diebesteallerzeiten.de/blog/module-15/. Please leave your comments there.
09/03/08 Edited to add: Plugins are now disabled by default, if you want to run plugins on the module content you must enable them in the module parameters.
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!
As you may have noticed, especially if you’ve sent a support request, things are currently going slowly here – I lag behind in answerings questions (this concerns, among other things, the reported problem with recent versions of Joomfish) and the 1.5 version of the module is still not feature complete.
Thing is, I’m not only swamped in work (that would be nothing new), I’m also caught in one of the nastiest traps for programmers – I work against a spec that does not actually make sense, so I have to try to mangle sense into the chaos by careful interpretation. That means I’m working or four or five hours, call the client to look at my work and spend the next four or five hours tearing everything down again. This is the kind of job I usually try to avoid, because even if they wanted to none of my clients could actually afford to put me through this kind of ordeal. But sometimes I have to put other things into consideration apart from money; even a one man shop sometimes needs to employ a certain degree of diplomacy.
Still, this means that at the moment I’m both overworked and underpaid, and this is not a good prerequisite to gather motivation for open source programming. Plus the modules mostly work, so there is no need for immediate intervention. I think (I hope!) that by the middle of the next week the worst will be over and I can get back to do a bit module developement.
As you can tell by my silence I’m pretty busy at the moment. But at least I managed to pack a new archive for the Place Here Module that integrates a bugfix from a guy who I only know by his moniker of n7Epsilon (sent in by reader zANavAShi). The module added sometimes a couple of empty elements to its output, that should be fixed by now. I also added a random ordering option.
