Introduction

In this video we’ll take a look at all the Settings available in Modules Anywhere and how they change the behaviour and functionality of Modules Anywhere.

In the previous videos we have already seen how to install Modules Anywhere and what the features are for the free and pro version.

But that was just scratching the surface of what Modules Anywhere can do and how you can use it.

Modules Anywhere is a plugin. Well, actually - as you can see here - 2 plugins. The main System Plugin, and an Editor Button.
All the settings, including those to control the editor button, are found in the System Plugin. So let’s open that one.

In this video we will be working with the latest version of Modules Anywhere, which is version 7.8.0. And what you see here is a Joomla 3.9.1 setup. If you are using newer versions, things might look a bit different.

And, as you can see, we have the Pro version installed. Some features and settings are only available in the Pro version. I will mention that when discussing those settings.

All we see here is just a short description of the extension. And on the right here, we have the general plugin settings that every plugin has.

The Modules Anywhere specific settings are in these different tabs.

All settings have a short description you can see when hovering over the title. That should give you enough information to know what a setting does.

Now, the default settings are fine for most setups. So you probably don’t need to change any. But in some cases you will want to change the default behaviour of Modules Anywhere.

Only change settings if you understand what they are for and how they affect the behaviour of the extension.

Behaviour

Let’s start with the ‘Behavior’ tab.

Default Style

As we have seen in the “Getting Started” video, Modules Anywhere allows us to control the style of the module by adding an extra attribute to the tag.

This “Default Style” setting here allows us to select a default style that Modules Anywhere should use when no style is given in the module tag. So for example, if we wanted all of our modules placed with Modules Anywhere to use the “well” style by default, we could specify it here.

This will save us the trouble of having to add the style to the syntax every time.

Let’s try that.

{module title="Login Form" style="well"}

So we remove the style attribute from the module tag, as it should now be applied by default. Let’s see…

{module title="Login Form"}

And, yes, our module is still surrounded by the “well” bootstrap style. You can still override the default with any other style of course.

Let’s move on to the next settings.

Enable parameter overriding

As we have seen in the previous video, the Parameter overriding feature is only available in the Pro version.

This allows us to override the modules parameters directly in the {module} tag.

If you don’t want to allow the use of this feature at all, for whatever reason, you can’t turn it off here.

Ignores

By default, Modules Anywhere will only show a module if it would normally be visible to the visitor too. This means that the the access level and the publishing state of the module need to match.

If you want to let Modules Anywhere show modules that are - for instance - unpublished, then you can tell Modules Anywhere to ignore the Publishing State here.

As you can see, Modules Anywhere will, by default, ignore the Module Assignments. This allow us to place the module anywhere we want, regardless of its assignments. But you might not want this behaviour. You might want to be able to control the module via the Module Assignments even when you place the module through Modules Anywhere. Well,in that case, simply switch this ‘Ignore’ setting to No.

Modules Anywhere will also respect the caching setting of the Module. But if you want to always cache the module output, regardless of its settings, you change set “Ignore Caching” to Yes.

We can still overrule these ‘Ignore’ settings in the individual module tags, using the correct attributes. So let’s say we do want to ignore the assignment settings of th e module by default. So we keep this setting to Yes.

But for this specific module tag we do not want to ignore the assignments we set up in the module. Then we simply add an “ignore underscore assignments” (ignore_assignments) attribute here. And give it a value of ‘false’.

We can also do this for the other Ignore settings. So that would be an “ignore access” attribute with a true or false value. This one would be “ignore state”. And “ignore caching”.

Frontend Editing

So, frontend editing… We’ve touched upon Frontend Editing in the video dedicated to the Pro version.

This option allows to edit the modules placed through Modules Anywhere directly from the frontend.

If we change “Frontend Editing” here by selecting “Default”… …the option will work based on whatever the “Inline Editing” is set to here in the Global Configuration. As you can see the option can be set to “Modules”, “Modules & Menus”, or “None”.

If that is enabled for Modules, we can see this edit button when hovering over the module.

And clicking on it brings us to the edit screen of the original module.

HTML Stuff

And finally the last couple of advanced options.

The ‘Fix HTML’ option should only be touched if you experience any output issues. When placing modules inside a paragraph, you can get nested paragraph tags. Or other html tags that shouldn’t be inside a paragraph. In those cases, Modules Anywhere will try to fix the html so that the html structure remains valid. In the rare cases where this may not be the behaviour you want, you can switch it off here. Or, like with the Ignore settings, you can add a ‘fix html’ attribute to the individual module tag.

And the last option here is this ‘Place HTML comments’.

Let’s look at the html output of this module inserted with Modules Anywhere. Here, we can see the output generated by Modules Anywhere is surrounded by this start and end comment tag.

<!-- START: Articles Anywhere -->...<!-- END: Articles Anywhere -->

There are also cases when the module has no output. For instance, when it does not pass the access level or publishing assignments. In those cases, there will also be an extra comment here, instead of the output, telling you why there is none. These comment tags can be very useful when trying to figure out why stuff is happening.

If these comment tags cause issues with the surrounding content where you are using the Modules Anywhere tags… ...then you can disable these comment tags here.

Security Options

All Security Options are exclusive to the Pro version. For most sites you don’t need to change these. But it can be useful on larger websites with multiple people that have rights to create and publish content.

Here we can select whether to allow Modules Anywhere to be used in articles, and which User Groups are allowed to use it.

With these settings below, we can disable the use of Modules Anywhere in certain components.

The advice is to not allow Modules Anywhere in components where non-backend users can post content. For instance in forums and message boards.

We can decide whether we want to just disable the functionality, or to remove the syntax altogether. And finally, we can select whet her to enable the use of Modules Anywhere in all remaining areas, such as modules.

Editor Button Options

Modules Anywhere comes with an editor button. We have seen the editor button in action in the previous videos. These options control how this editor button functions.

Depending on what editor you use, the Modules Anywhere button will either show up here or as a separate button under the editor.

This window allows us to choose what module we want to insert, as well as the title and style options.
But what if you wanted to have the title to be disabled by default when you first click the Editor Button?

Or if you wanted to change the list of styles available for selection in the dropdown here.

We can change these things in the Editor Button Settings.

We can input our custom list of styles separated via a comma, and we can change the title default setting.

For example, let’s set the ‘Show Title’ option to ‘No’ here.

Now if we re-open the Modules Anywhere popup, you can see that the option is now as we set it.

The button here shows the word ‘Module’. If, for whatever reason, we want to have this show a different word, then we can also change that in the settings.

Let’s rename it to ‘Insert Module’ instead.

And after a refresh we now have the new button name showing.

Finally, we can also decide whether we want the Editor Button to be available in the frontend editor or not.

Tag Syntax

These settings determine what plugin tag syntax Modules Anywhere should use.

By default the syntax for the single modules is ‘module’ inside ‘curly braces’. And for entire module positions the syntax is ‘modulepos’ tag in ‘curly braces’. In most cases we don’t have to change these. But there are cases where you might find the syntax conflicts with other extensions you have installed. In that case a solution can be to change the syntax of the Modules Anywhere tags.

But keep in mind: Changing these settings will mean that any existing use of Modules Anywhere using the old syntax will not work anymore. So it is best to change this before starting to use Modules Anywhere in your site.

Just to show you, we’ll change the tag word to ‘mod’… And let’s use square brackets instead.

We’ll just insert a new module under our old one. Click here. And as you can see, it now uses our newly defined syntax.

And here we see that our old syntax doesn’t work any more.

Again, you probably don’t want to change the default syntax, but if for whatever reason you want a different syntax, you can do so.

Finally, we can also tell Modules Anywhere to handle the Joomla core module tags.

This relates to the {loadmodule} and {loadposition} tags from this core “Load Modules” plugin.

By turning this setting on, you can then safely disable the "Load Modules" plugin altogether and let Modules Anywhere handle the core tags as well.

And those are all the settings for Modules Anywhere.

Recap

So, in this video we have seen where to find the Settings that control Modules Anywhere and how those affect the way Modules Anywhere works.

You can find a list of all the settings, including their description in the Modules Anywhere tutorial.

Stay tuned for other videos that look more in depth at specific functionalities.