Joomla 1.5 has finally arrived and so I guess I should put a bit more effort into the 1.5 module – so far most bug reports and feature request have been for the “contentitem module”, but I expect that will change soon.
While I’m willing to honour every feature request I possibly can I hate unnecssary efforts, so I do not want to include features nobody uses. The content item module has a feature called “merge items” that allows to display multiple content items as one, so you can print or pdf (can I use “pdf” as a verb?) multiple items in one go. I built this for the guy on whose request I originally wrote the module, but I’m not sure how many people actually use this.
The “place here”-module so far misses the merge-option. I would be interested in your opinion – do you think this is an important feature, or just a nice-to-have (and other features should be other included first), or is this completely useless?
I didn’t really intend to make any more changes to the content item module for Joomla 1.0.x because, frankly, the code is less than elegant and the best way to improve it would be to rewrite it from scratch (on the other hand it works, so why bother). Still I implemented a suggestion from the comments, in part because it allowed me to get rid of a large swath of code in the module.
The change concerns the way content items are ordered when they are displayed in the module. There are now three select boxes with ordering criteria (order by section, category, create date etc) that will be applied one after another, although I expect that not all combinations will make sense.
This is one of the few times that a new version is not fully compatible with previous versions; you can still overwrite the files with the new versions, but you have to re-enter the ordering information in the module parameters before thing will work properly. Both the new and old versions are available at the download page (see left sidebar).
at least if you ask for something that’s easy to implement. In the comments Pieter asked for a new Parameter so the ‘place here” module would display the articles according to the ordering from the article manager. I added the parameter but I feel that the ordering system should be more flexible, so I’ll think of something.
I did some minor updates on the Place Here-module – partly just behind-the-scenes-bugfixing (including the issues in the comments 20 and 21 respectively) , but also two new parameters:
- Link Titles – does of course what the name says and makes the title of an article a link if there is additional text (please note that articles displayed via the module will use the module settings, not the settings you make in the article edit view)
- Hide current item – reads the article id from the url and hides the article with the corresponding id in the module, so you don’t have the same article twice
Available at the Download page. This is still marked as alpha but apparently a number of people already use it without problems (the alpha status is more due to the fact that a number of features are still missing as compared to the contentitem module for 1.0.x).
Edited to add: There are no special upgrade instructions. Simply overwrite existing files with the new ones.
The module uses tables in two places: a) as a wrapper to arrange content items – ‘articles’ as they are now called in Joomla 1.5 – in columns, and b) in the template file to format the articles.
As for a) I added a parameter “Output mode” with the values “table”,”div” and “raw”.
- table – just works like before
- div – wraps the articles into div tags. The divs around “leading” articles have the class “mod_placehere_leading”, following articles the class, you guess it, “mod_placehere_following”. No CSS is delivered with the module, so you can/have to style the divs on your own (for example set a width and use a float on “following” articles to get a column effect for the articles)
- raw just prints the content items on the page, without any additional markup
To get b) rid of the remaining tables you will have to fiddle with the template file. Unlike in the module for 1.0.x the module does not use the content componentes template but has its own template file in modules/mod_placehere/tmpl. Change the HTML but don’t mess with the PHP Code. In time I will attempt to provide a tableless template.
Tested with 1.5 RC3 on PHP 4.4 / Windows XP Home. Available at the download page .
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 was looking for a workaround for the Itemid-issue for Joomla 1.0.12 (and for those who cannot use the compatibility setting in 1.0.13) and have to report that there is none.
The idea of of the content item module was to mimick the mainbody-call als closely as possible by using the core functions to display items. The Itemid is calculated in these core functions and unfortunately there is no way to override this (short of modifying core files which would defy the purpose of a plugin API). So I have to say sorry, there is nothing I can do about that.
I answered a couple of open questions in the FAQ section, some of them already one or two weeks old. Sorry I couldn’t keep up faster.
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).
