If you must provide someone with access to your domain name management area, make sure you have a clear idea of what it is they intend to do with that access. If you’re using GoDaddy, you can assign someone as an AccountExec, so that they cannot change the account password on you. However, even with AccountExec access they’d be able to transfer the domain to another registrar if you’re not careful.

It’s your site: make sure you retain full control over it, even if you don’t want to manage it on a daily basis!

Web Site Support & Maintenance

My initial reaction to the news: horror. OK, not quite, though the thought of JavaScript going into early retirement was a funny one. I don’t see that happening any time soon. I do recall Google Buzz and what a fiasco that was, though I badly *wanted* to like it. It was officially terminated / retired December 15th. Now of course there’s Google+, which seems to be gaining momentum. With Microsoft and other major players already poo-pooing Dart, it’s starting to look like another Buzz situation though for different reasons (Buzz suffered from concerns about its privacy settings. Perhaps Dart will return in another incarnation. To follow in the same trend as Google+ may I suggest something like Google♥ or Google→? The second doesn’t quite look like a dart, and the first might get confused for “Google Love” rather than “Google Heart” … but the name they pick(ed) is the least of their worries with this new undertaking IMHO.

Check out some of the discussion over at SitePoint.

documentary film non-profit project

We built a site for a public health non-profit called using Drupal 7. It is set up using the Drupal content management system so that staff can manage the site on their own. It features integrated blog RSS feeds from four separate external blogs. It also features integrated maps of projects, using a Drupal integration of the Google Maps API.  The project is funded by USAID and is managed by FHI 360, CARE and Winrock International.

Name and link withheld due to client confidentiality. Please contact us to find out more about this project.

Simple configurable payment module 

Download it

We created this module for DC Internationals, a language institute located in Washington, D.C. Check it out.
Each language has its own page and its own customized payment form. This was done by simply copying the module and assigning it to the various pages .. one per page.

Founded in 1942, MSDC meets monthly at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, on the national Mall in Washington, DC. Members range from total novices to true experts. We redesigned their site using Joomla, so the society can now edit their pages more easily.

Read more

Drupal 7.10, a maintenance release with numerous bug fixes (no security fixes) is now available for download. Several major bugs, including one causing errors with the 5.x branch of Drush, have been fixed this release. See the Drupal 7.10 release notes for a full listing.

Read more: http://drupal.org/drupal-7.10

This is the next major release in the series, which started with 1.0 in the Mambo days, progressed to the now very stable 1.5, and on to 1.6/1.7, which were intended as a stepping stone to 2.5. We have seen conflicting reports of an early January or late December release date. Either way, there will be a period of months in which Joomla users plan their migration to 2.5. If you are not using too many extensions you could probably migrate fairly painlessly (a migration tool is reportedly in the works).

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Many of our customers’ sites are doing quite well in search results, with some in first place (not just page one) of Google. Our own site is on page one for “award winning web design”, and beats out the Web Association Awards site. We won a Web Award in September for our work on the Vineyard Arts Project site, done using the Joomla CMS(content management system).

Have a look at our SEO page and let us know if you could use some help on your site. We offer no-obligation free initial SEO consultations.

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Features a custom e-commerce component integrating Joomla 1.7 with SouthWare, using web services.

Atlanta Computer Group specializes in ATM parts, supplies, and repairs. ACG uses SouthWare Netlink, for which we developed a custom Joomla application.

They use SouthWare for their enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, together with Netlink. Their previous site ran on a Windows platform, but they did not have a convenient way to editing their own pages while incorporating e-commerce into their site.

Working very closely with staff at Opus Integrated Business Systems (http://www.opus-is.com), we developed a Joomla SouthWare Netlink integration including component, plugins, and modules from the ground up. These use web services (SOAP) to connect to SouthWare / Netlink and display products, categories, pricing, and so on. Opus built the web services and some of the Ajax functionality, while we managed the Joomla integration and consumption of web services. The final site is fully SSL-encrypted and features seamless SouthWare e-commerce with Joomla as the framework and content management system.

Here’s the code:

<?php

function curPageURL() {
 $pageURL = 'http';
 //if ($_SERVER["HTTPS"] == "on") {
 if ($_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] != "80") {
	 $pageURL .= "s";
 }//other way to detect SSL??
 $pageURL .= "://";
	 if ($_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] != "80") {
	  $pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].":".$_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
	 } else {
	  $pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
	 }
 return $pageURL;
}
$url = curPageURL();
$admins = get_admins();
    $isadmin = false;
    foreach ($admins as $admin) {
        if ($USER->id == $admin->id) {
            $isadmin = true;
            break;
        }
    }
    if ($isadmin) {
		if(
		!isset($_GET['lang']) ||
		(isset($_GET['lang']) && ($_GET['lang'] != 'en'))
		){
			if(strstr(curPageURL(),'lang=fa')){//if not home page
				$url = str_replace('lang=fa','lang=en',$url);
        		header('Location: '.$url);
			}
			else{//URL must not have an = in it, therefore it has GET vars and has a ? as well. It is possible to have a ? without ='s though, so we check for = and not ?.
				///header('Location: '.curPageURL().'?lang=en');
			}
		}
    } else {
        if(
		!isset($_GET['lang']) ||
		(isset($_GET['lang']) && ($_GET['lang'] != 'fa'))
		){
			if(strstr(curPageURL(),'=')){//if not home page
				$url = str_replace('lang=en','lang=fa',$url);
        		//header('Location: '.$url);
			}
			else{//URL must have an = in it, therefore it has GET vars and has a ? as well. It is possible to have a ? without ='s though, so we check for = and not ?.
				//header('Location: '.curPageURL().'?lang=fa');
			}
		}

?>

You can go to Manage Categories and view which products are in which category, but you can’t directly edit the products from there … you have to use Manage Products for that. In other words, you just have to type in some part of the product’s name and filter on that.

For all the rage that Magento is, I cannot fathom how this could have been overlooked except intentionally. Yes, you can attempt to add a Categories column in (see this link) and surely there are commercial add-ons for this, but something like this should be one of the first core features in any e-commerce platform in my opinion. There are some who speculate that Magento was intentionally built to look good but be lacking in certain respects, to coax people towards purchasing add-ons and support. I can see why they would think that way.

In a similar vein, we are planning on moving our bank accounts away from certain unnamed corporate behemoths to a local community bank who may actually feel they have a stake in our success.

Moodle used to have no built-in translation capability as best I can remember (back in 2003 …) but the text filter plugins in Moodle have changed that. Now you can enter <span> tags with lang attributes and a “multilang” class to enter content as follows:

<span lang="en" class="multilang">Some English text here</span><span lang="fa" class="multilang">Some Persian text here</span>

I purposely didn’t type in Persian above, since it may not display properly for everyone.

The idea with the above is that Moodle will then only show the currently selected language. That works, except for the course names, which are still untranslatable. For sites with just two or three languages you can just include both language versions in the course name, e.g. “Management 101 – Persian Translation Here”. Not ideal, but gets the job done.  This was our solution in our 2003 run-in with Moodle and is still our solution today. There probably is a way to do this properly but it would involve much programming and redoing of Moodle’s title fields.

We’ll be using/building a Moodle theme that supports left-to-right as well as right-to-left languages. We are doing the same in Joomla.

We are using Joomdle to connect Moodle with Joomla. This works great for Joomla 1.5 and JoomFish 2. Joomdle has a development version that’s compatible with Joomla 1.7, but does not yet offer multilingual support, so we are stuck with Joomla 1.5 and JoomFish for now.

Joomla by default will show both <span> tags, so the template needs a little PHP love to hide the non-relevant language content. Here is what we came up with, which works great for just two languages:

<?php
//plethora mod
$registry = JFactory::getConfig();
$jfLang = $registry->getValue("joomfish.language", false);
if($jfLang->shortcode == 'fa'){
?>
<style type="text/css">
span[lang|="en"]{
	display:none!important;
}
</style>
<?php
}
if($jfLang->shortcode == 'en'){
?>
<style type="text/css">
span[lang|="fa"]{
	display:none!important;
}
</style>
<?php
}
//end
?>

We just inserted this at the end of the <head> portion of our template’s index.php file.

EIT, LLC ($75+ M/yr) is located in Sterling, Virginia and has been providing complete electronic design, assembly and test services since 1977. EIT’s old site was built using static HTML pages and was becoming outdated. EIT staff needed a way to edit pages without involving web developers in every content change. In addition, EIT’s southern Virginia facility (in Danville) had its own site at eitsouth.com, the contents of which needed to be merged into the main corporate site at eit.com.

We designed and built a new site from the ground up using Drupal 7, configured in such a way that designated staff members could edit pages. The page editor supports content revisions, so that editors can roll back to a previous version at will. The design features an image slideshow on the home page and a customized header image for each area of the site. The Careers page allows the HR derpartment to add job openings that candidates can apply for on the spot, including the required EEO (Equal Employment Opportunity) form. Submitted form data is emailed to relevant personnel within the company, and can be exported to CSV or Excel formats.

Main Swing, a chic cutting-edge jazz band based in Washington D.C., performs swing, bee-bop, blues, latin-jazz, and popular dance favorites. Their previous site consisted of a single-page HTML file. We built a new site using Joomla, allowing their site to grow more easily, and enabling the owners to edit the pages on their own. We also added an mp3 player with playlist support.

MDI Solutions, a provider of electronic health records and data integration services in both North America and the UK, approached Plethora Design for some visual and functional improvements to their existing Joomla site. We implemented numerous design and SEO improvements, including changes to the fonts, menu system, XML sitemap, meta descriptions, and titles, and added links at the bottom of all pages for additional search engine optimization as well as providing an alternate way for users of the site to access information. We also adjusted the home page to accommodate a new page for MDI’s UK market, using modules as home page content.

MESALI / DC Internationals offers foreign language classes including Arabic, Pashto, Kurdish, Turkish, Urdu, Persian, and many more.

MESALI runs ads on NPR radio (WAMU 88.5 in DC), and approached us for help migrating to a better hosting environment and cleaning up the site overall. We improved the layout and styling of their Joomla site while migrating their tuition payment forms away from their previous host.

We also helped out on SEO. When we got involved they were hardly being found on Google. Now you can Google “arabic classes dc” and find them on page one. That took only a matter of weeks to accomplish.

Realdealgolf.com is a golf community with auctions, deals, and maps. Users can customize their profiles, connect with other users, send private messages, locate other users nearby on the map (using a Google Maps integration), bid on penny auctions, and see daily deals for their area.

We wrote a quick fix for this. Open up the default.php template file for the FPSS layout you’re using. We used JJ-Oobs so we opened up /modules/mod_fpss/tmpl/JJ-Obs/default.php. Right after “foreach($slides as $slide):” insert the following

if($slide->link == 'URL'){
$slide->link = 'javascript:;';
}

We used a “javascript:;” URL rather than “#” because this way if you slideshow is far down the page, clicking it will not take you back to the top of the page … using “#” can conflict with named anchors but “javascript:;” does not.

Founded in 2007, Vineyard Arts Project is a non-profit, tax-exempt organization whose mission is to foster, develop, and promote the live arts as experiences central to education and the community of Martha’s Vineyard. Its founder and artistic director is Ashley Melone, whose most recent credits include ballet coordinator for Darren Aronofsky’s film Black Swan, for which Natalie Portman won an Oscar.

Having designed their original site in 2008, we were asked to redesign it with an emphasis on upcoming programs. As with the previous site, the site features beautiful photos of dancers in motion, but we opted for a light and airy look: white, light blue, and orange. The layout was built as a custom Joomla template, and is iPad and iPhone compatible.

The original site also used a custom Joomla template, with a Flash home page based on photos of various Vineyard Arts Project dancers. This minimalist gray / orange design was accentuated by the warm colors in the home page photo, and put the viewer’s attention squarely on the content, whether it be photos or text. The new design maintains that, but using a light color scheme and more emphasis on user participation through social media.

I will say I am a bit stunned at the lack of built in voice recognition on the iPad 2. It has a microphone, and using the google app you can search using voice, but why on earth can’t you do this with safari or for that matter any place where you might want to enter text… Like when writing emails or notes? Evernote is useful, but built in voice to text would be far superior.

The mission of the Council is to bring together the North County’s neighborhoods to promote communication and cooperation between member organizations of Northern Pinellas County, to foster a sense of community, to provide a forum for member organizations, and most important is to act as a neighborhood advocate for the benefit of our member organizations and to bring a common voice to state and county government including and not limited to the Pinellas County Board of County Commissioners and State Legislators.

Stratos Solutions is a professional technical services company specializing in Systems Engineering and Technical Assistance (SETA advisory services) in support of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). We designed and built a new site for them using Joomla 1.6, to allow them to edit the site without outside help. We also built a private document sharing tool for them, also using Joomla.

This new Bartonsville, Texas dance studio was in need of a content management system and new site in advance of the opening of their studio. We designed a custom Joomla 1.6 template, with Mootools JavaScript effects, image slideshows, embedded video, Twitter and Facebook feeds, and a custom-designed image menu.

mapping / data filtering for Haiti aid NGOs

Konekte is a mapping tool developed by the Garnet Group for use by and in consultation with the Clinton Global Initiative’s Haiti Action Network (HAN). It displays data from HAN member organizations so that interested parties can see what other organizations are doing and where. It allows people to see what other activities are being carried out in a given area, and is intended as a way to reduce duplication of effort by the many non-profits active there. Konekte features data filtering of multiple organizations vs. multiple activities, the results of which are displayed on the map and in a data table that can be exported to CSV or printed. A Google Earth export feature is also in the works. Konekte is built using Ushahidi, but the data filtering was achieved using custom programming, because Ushahidi only allows for a single set of categories and has no filtering built in.

• Client: Clinton Global Initiative
• Link: view site
• Location: New York, NY

document.getElementById(‘yourelement’).style.display = ‘none’;

With jQuery there are easier ways to do this, but I’m talking just about plain JavaScript.

But suppose you’re using some script that’s encoded and prevents you from adding unique IDs into <div> tags, for example. This is the case with CBSubs, for Joomla. The files are encoded and for most DIVs there are no IDs, so we’re left having to select them based on the CSS classes (in CBSubs you can assign each plan a unique CSS class).

Here’s one way of doing it;

Full article;  http://tinyurl.com/6h6szp2

It also seems that targeting for iPhone using CSS doesn’t really work with iBBDemo2. For example:

@media only screen and (max-device-width: 480px) {

#somedivtag{
width:300px;
}

}

A new corporate site for a northern Virginia / Washington DC area solutions provider with a presence in the Equinix data center for North America, near AOL’s operational headquarters. The site is built using Joomla 1.5 to allow AICIT staff to edit it themselves. We also designed their original site for them in 2009, and were very involved in the redesign effort from start to finish, including copywriting, content development, layout design, and programming.

Founded in 2007, Vineyard Arts Project is a non-profit, tax-exempt organization whose mission is to foster, develop, and promote the live arts as experiences central to education and the community of Martha’s Vineyard. Its founder and artistic director is Ashley Melone, whose most recent credits include ballet coordinator for Darren Aronofsky’s film Black Swan.

Having designed their original site in 2008, we were asked to redesign it with an emphasis on upcoming programs. As with the previous site, the site features beautiful photos of dancers in motion, but we opted for a light and airy look: white, light blue, and orange. The layout was built as a custom Joomla template, and is iPad and iPhone compatible.

The original site also used a custom Joomla template using a Flash home page based on photos of various Vineyard Arts Project dancers. This minimalist gray / orange design is accentuated by the warm colors in the home page photo, and puts the viewer’s attention squarely on the content, whether it be photos or text.

http://tinyurl.com/6bjkc6x

We have written a number of blog posts on the Concrete5 content management system.

Rather than writing it as a separate module, I have extended the the normal product categories module to have this as an option in addition to all the other options such as Transmenu, Links List, and so on. This should make it easier to incorporate in the next release since the work’s already done.

The following is in use on a site running Joomla 1.5.23 and VirtueMart 1.1.8. You can download VirtueMart here. Download the “complete package”, unzip it, and look in the modules directory for mod_product_categories_1.1.8.j15.zip. This is the module that need to be modified.

After making the following modifications, you will need to edit your categories module and set the category display type to “Dropdown select menu”.

There are two file modifications and one new file:
- modules/mod_product_categories/mod_product_categories.php (modified)
- modules/mod_product_categories/mod_product_categories.xml (modified)
- modules/mod_virtuemart/vm_select.php (new file).

(For the code for modules/mod_virtuemart/vm_select.php, please see the updated post at http://www.plethoradesign.com/virtuemart-category-dropdown-module.)

Modify modules/mod_product_categories/mod_product_categories.php:

After:

case 'tigratree':
/* TigraTree script to display structured categories */
include( $vm_path . '/vm_tigratree.php' );
break;

Paste this:

//product categories select mod
case 'select':
include( $vm_path . '/vm_select.php' );
break; 
//

Modify modules/mod_product_categories/mod_product_categories.xml:

After:

<option value="dtree">dTree</option>

Paste this:

<!--product categories select mod-->
<option value="select">Dropdown select menu</option>
<!--end-->

For the code for modules/mod_virtuemart/vm_select.php, please see the updated post at http://www.plethoradesign.com/virtuemart-category-dropdown-module.

http://tinyurl.com/3gz8ow5

The editing interface is still a bit clunky and will also be improved.

Download it here

Enjoy!

This was a fun little project redesigning the splash page and partially redesigning the WordPress theme for this extreme winter sports site.

For IE9, it means much better and more reliable web page rendering, including support for CSS3 effects like rounded corners.

For Firefox 4, it means tabbed browsing and hardware acceleration á la Chrome (for faster browsing). Firefox was starting to be eclipsed by Google Chrome on those fronts, and now has a shot at maintaining its lead. One reason for that is that Firefox has loads more addons that are also more mature than the ones Chrome offers. In addition – and this is admittedly a minor thing – Firefox has Print Preview and Chrome STILL doesn’t. Let’s give Google the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s because they want to save the environment … but if that were the case they should remove the Print function altogether!

You can install Firefox 4 alongside a previous version of Firefox by installing it into a separate Program Files folder (for those of you using Windows).

The Web Developer Toolbar extension for Firefox is already available for Firefox 4.

This is the first site we create using Concrete5. Overall it was a good experience.

I feel that the editing process could be streamlined, as slick as it is. Let’s get my basic gripes out of the way:

• Inserting images and file links requires too many clicks. Why not show a “Use this image” or “Use this file” button after the file has successfully uploaded … the way WordPress does? The average user is going to have a hard time locating the file they just uploaded.
• File management should support directories. Maybe you can add those using FTP, but it isn’t possible with Concrete5. Instead, it offers “Sets” as a way of organizing files. After familiarizing myself with this, it worked OK, but I can’t help but worry that I am potentially overwriting existing files. Using directories allows me to know exactly where files are. It is the conventional approach, and using conventions is one sure-fire way of ensuring usability, even if it isn’t as slick as Sets. A first-time editor shouldn’t have to learn a new method of organizing files: use the conventions that people know … files and directories.
• Saving a page takes two clicks; Exit Edit Mode, and then Publish. Why not simple show a simple Save button showing a friendly icon of some sort, and save a version of the page automatically? Currently, you are presented with a screen asking you to name the version of this page. It’s great that versioning is built in, but it should be as painless as possible. In my opinion, a timestamp should be sufficient for the version name.
• Blocks are easy to use, and saving blocks for reuse is easy too, using the “Add to Scrapbook” feature. Unfortunately, these blocks do not function the same way as Drupal blocks or Joomla modules. When you insert a Concrete5 block from your Scrapbook and then want to edit the block once and have it update on multiple pages, it’s a no-go. You will need to edit it in place on one of your pages, then re-save it to your Scrapobook, then remove the previously inserted blocks from your pages, and finally re-insert the block from your Scrapbook. This is a severe limitation in my opinion, which will limit Concrete5′s usefulness on larger sites. Imagine having a block assigned to a few dozen pages. Who wants to reinsert a block that many times?

Please note that my comments are based on a default configuration using Concrete5. Perhaps some of these issues can be overcome with modifications, but I think that is beside the point. I do still think it is a great content management system for “brochure” sites of perhaps up to a dozen pages, but would not yet consider it for any larger-scale content management. For that I will stick with Joomla and Drupal.

We built this using Joomla 1.5, since that is what they were using. We redesigned and modernized their site.

Drupal 7 features a vastly improved administrative interface that is inspired by WordPress and secondarily by Joomla’s modal / lightbox windows. Paired with Drupal’s very robust content management features, this is a potent combination. Administration in Drupal is much less daunting now than it was in version 6.

Designing a multilingual site using Drupal 7 is also easier now. There’s a handy Translate tab, and language management and configuration is pretty straightforward, yet offers sophisticated options at the same time. A very good balance in my opinion.

Our original review of Concrete5 has gotten quite a response from the Concrete5 community, and I felt it was time for a closer look.

Some quick observations:

There are some really nice themes in the Concrete5 Marketplace

Installing themes could be made clearer. Here are some problems I had while trying to install a theme downloaded from the marketplace:

• Currently, you supposedly (according to many posts on the Concrete5 forums) have to unzip a theme’s zip file and FTP the resulting folder to the /themes directory. Trouble is, if you download a theme from the marketplace using Add to Cart, many of them are actually “packages” containing some other stuff as well as a theme – in a sub-folder. If you follow the normal instructions, you would end up FTPing it to /themes rather than /packages, and then when you go to the theme admin area in Concrete5, you won’t be able to install your new themes.
• I was trying to install a theme called Innovation, which I downloaded from the Marketplace. Unzipped, it creates a folder called ‘cannonf700_innovation’ which itself contains a folder called /themes/innovation. The contents of /cannonf700_innovation/themes/innovation should ACTUALLY go in /themes/innovation, which begs the question: where should the controller.php file in /root/themes/cannonf700_innovation/ go? The root directory? If that’s the case, each time you install a new theme, controller.php gets overwritten.
• Zip files should be standardized so when unzipped, no additional work is needed beyond simply FTPing to /themes; perhaps with non-marketplace themes this works fine. Ideally, you’d be able to install via a web interface with no FTP at all.

As it turns out, the themes you download from the Marketplace are in fact zipped up as packages, so you must upload them to the /root/packages/ directory, then login to your site, go to your dashboard and go to Add Functionality. Then you can install your newly available themes. It’s easy, but you have to know it. I had looked in various places on the Concrete5 including in the forums before I stumbled upon this explanation. I really like the idea of packages, but wonder why there is a separate way of installing themes at Pages and Themes. For the Concrete5 neophyte, this seems contradictory. There should be just one place to do that.

Nice Features:

• When creating a new page, the page alias is created on the spot. In Joomla, you have to click save the article first.
• If you don’t want to enter text in your new page just yet, Concrete5 won’t force you, whereas Joomla does.

Concrete5 is very user-friendly for editors and site owners, and with a bit clearer documentation in the How-to’s area of the Concrete5 site, it will see even faster adoption by those of us using Joomla and Drupal. I really wish Joomla had the kind of user-friendliness Concrete5 has. There are in fact some Joomla “alpha” projects that seek to do much of what Concrete5 already does, and does very well. I don’t believe Drupal has any aspirations to emulate Concrete5′s editing interface, either, though they should.

In our last post, we showed how Google Chrome can no longer be ignored. However, some major sites apparently still pretend Firefox doesn’t exist.

Case in point: E-onlinedata.com. Now, I like them. I use them for Authorize.net accounts. Their previous site needed serious help, and their new one does look infinitely better … in Internet Explorer 8 and (magically) Google Chrome, but not Firefox. I think they got lucky with Chrome; that can’t have been on purpose.

Firefox renders their menu system without any CSS, so that it overlaps their layout and becomes ugly and unusable.
Not only do they have CSS problems, but their content is not fully fleshed out, as it turns out.

Just try visiting their home page, then select Internet Merchant from Become a Merchant (top left), then muddle your way through to click on the  Authorize.net link under Merchant Services (right-hand menu). You are taken to a super-long breadcrumb / pathway, with no content whatsoever below. Sorry, customer. That’s the end of the line for you:

Granted, Chrome is not taking over the market any time soon, but 10% is nothing to sneeze at! Chrome can not be left out of the equation any longer.

This method is used by RocketTheme for their newer Joomla templates, for example. I think it’s a sensible approach to slicing up the areas of your layout. Give it a try!

See for yourself (click the image to view it full-size):

Some observations:

• First off, I had to re-register on their site just to use their new site. They apparently did not migrate the old user data to the new site. For a site handling millions of users, I think this is a major no-no.
• When view plan details for a health plan, why on earth are all the various benefits not expanded by default? Why should I as a customer have to click on each one to view the detail. It is a table, and that information should simply be visible by default. Make it a longer page if you must.
• The FIND A DOCTOR and CHECK CLAIM STATUS buttons at the top right do not look like they’re clickable. If you move your cursor over them, you do not get a hand cursor – it remains an arrow.
• Where can I find billing-related information? It is nowhere to be found.
• The Account Summary link at the top left takes up precious space for no good reason. Why not just go with a left column only, and put everything inside that?
• The blue and purple Plans & Benefits and Health & Wellness navigation is not obvious. It’s artsy, and I can appreciate that, but for regular end-users it is not at all obvious.
• There really should be just ONE navigation menu, for clarity. They have FOUR different kinds of navigation. It is not consistent, and this makes it confusing. It’s just “all over the place”.
• In Google Chrome at least, I get an SSL warning about mixed SSL and non-SSL content. You should make sure all your images, CSS files, and JavaScript files are being loaded using SSL (https), not http.

Conclusion

I bet their design process was centered on improving the backend functioning of their site and interaction with their databases as well as electronic health records, and then they crammed in some design at the very end. If they focused on design from the get-go, it wouldn’t look like such a mish-mash. The user experience is key for sites like this, but instead it looks like a committee decided which functions should be included in the user area, and it was left to the designers to merge that all into one (unfortunately incoherent) whole. I think they got the process backwards, their programmers and designers did not communicate well, and/or it was all designed by committee.

This article is about K2, which works with Joomla.

We created menu items pointing to “generic” tag views. Each tag has its own Itemid, which is fine. However, when you click on “read more” for any of the items on the generic tag page, the ‘read more’ link uses the default K2 Itemid rather than the Itemid of the current page / menu item. This does seem like a bug to me. The read more links should use the Itemids of the current page or at least the menu item that brought the viewer to that ‘read more’ link.

In our case, K2′s default Itemid is 17 (as set in the menu).  We also have a menu item for a tag view, with an Itemid of 37.
The ‘read more’ URLs should have been in this format:

index.php?option=com_k2&view=itemlist&layout=generic&tag=Health%20Care&task=tag&Itemid=37

.. but were showing up as:

index.php?option=com_k2&view=itemlist&layout=generic&tag=Health%20Care&task=tag&Itemid=17

We have written a small override that solved this for us, since I could find no other way to solve this. We dislike core modifications but in this case it seemed to be the only way:

In /components/k2/models/item.php around line 62 (search for “read more link” .. it should be the first one), add this:

//mod to replace K2 Itemid with current page’s Itemid.

if(JRequest::getVar(‘Itemid’) && JRequest::getVar(‘layout’) && (JRequest::getVar(‘layout’) == ‘generic’) && JRequest::getVar(‘task’) && (JRequest::getVar(‘task’) == ‘tag’)){

//MAKE SURE TO CHANGE “Itemid=17″ TO WHATEVER ITEMID YOUR K2 USES:

$link = str_replace(‘Itemid=17′,’Itemid=’.JRequest::getInt(‘Itemid’),$link);

}

//end

1. Click Banners, or go to Components > Banner > Banners.
2. Upload the banner image or Flash swf to /public_html/images/banners.
3. At this point you can create a new banner from scratch (New), or select an existing one and Copy it. When copying, make sure to edit the banner’s settings to associate it with the correct client, and enable it (set Show Banner to Yes). Set the URL and other settings. Select the image/SWF from the pull-down menu (Banner Image Selector). You don’t need to set width and height.
4. If using Flash, add Custom Banner Code as follows:{flashad width=”300″ height=”250″}where_is_prg_large_rect4_7-19-10.swf{/flashad}The file name should match a file in /public_html/images/banners, and the dimensions need to match the Flash file’s actual dimensions.

   *** This method requires AllVideos Reloaded, and relies on a custom tag defined in Components > AllVideos Reloaded > Manage Tags / Presets. For iPad users and others requiring HTML5 instead of Flash, we will need to update the associated video player to support both HTML5 and Flash (see my other email about HTML5); stay tuned for details on how to do that.

   The Flash file contains a blank Button with a Hit area (4th frame inside the Button) covering the entire movie,  which links to the banner ad’s unique ID, so that clicking the Flash ad will still track the click. The Button has this ActionScript code attached to it (hit F9 in Flash to view the code):

   on(press){
   getURL(“http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?option=com_banners&task=click&bid=9″, “_blank”);
   }

   .. where bid = this banner’s ID. You should save the banner, and then you can find its ID in the right column of Components > Banner > Banners.

   I have attached a sample Flash file (FLA).

Here’s how:

1. Sign up for Twitter and Facebooks accounts (in case you’ve been living under a rock the past decade).
2. Log in to your Facebook account and then visit http://apps.facebook.com/twitter/. It will walk you through the setup.

If you use or are considering using Joomla, check out Autotweet NG, which can send a tweet every time a Joomla article or K2 item is added. We have used this with K2, and the only complaint / bug worth mentioning is that copying a K2 item does not seem to create a tweet .. you have to create a NEW item and save it. Autotweet NG also offers a commercial version which has some pretty advanced Facebook integration (including posting images from K2), but if you just want text, the Facebook Twitter app will probably be just fine.

WordPress also offers a number of plugins that can send a tweet upon for each new post, or that can display your Twitter status as a widget. We use Twitter Tools.

There are some programmatic ways of excluding sub-folders or specific files, but they are complicated, and I don’t think it should be that complicated to achieve conditional CSS. The irony is that what follows is a workaround to achieve conditional CSS using Microsoft technology, and the only reason this is needed is because Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 do not render pages quite according to standards (though IE8 is much, much better than the previous two). I think it’s funny that we have to use a workaround JUST to be able to render pages appropriately in Microsoft’s own browsers, using ASP.net themes.

The solution is pretty simple; don’t use the “.css” file extension. You can rename your CSS file from “ie7.css” to “ie7.css.conditional” or “ie7.css.whatever”.
Then, include it into your master page;

The above assumes the use of dynamic themes, hence the use of Page.Theme.

This may also helps those upgrading from Express to the full-fledged SQL server. This trick was the only thing that worked for me after many hours of debugging.

I hope it helps someone!

Maybe I’m missing something obvious here .. ?

Also, since I was using images for the menu items, I needed to hide the text. I managed to hide the text from the menu items, keeping only the image. But when you edit the menu, you can no longer see the menu item names, so you may get lost when trying to edit the menu items. It isn’t ideal, especially if you need to hand the project off to a customer who wants to edit the menu on their own. Again … why the lack of elegance when .net can do so many great things otherwise? There should be a simple option to hide the text.

Not everyone uses Outlook, Thunderbird, etc (e-mail clients), and assuming that can cost you potential leads and business.

Someone who uses only web-based e-mail will want to be able to quickly copy and paste the e-mail address. Now, you can of course right-click and copy the link address, but then you still have to remove the “mailto:” part. Why put your visitors through so much unnecessary trouble if you really want them to contact you?

There are some valid concerns about attracting spam, but those can be mostly overcome using JavaScript cloaking. I think it would be preferable to receive some spam AND more e-mails from your site visitors, than it would be to receive less spam and fewer e-mails from your site visitors, but maybe it’s just me.

Access Level Control (ACL)

It now features a robust ACL system, though some of the inheritance rules will take some getting used to. This is often cited as a feature Drupal has and Joomla lacks, but soon enough that will be a moot point. From my understanding there will be just one more beta in about two weeks, and then it should be time for 1.6!

Nested categories

Joomla always suffered from a rigid approach to categorization, with Sections and Categories. A section could contain categories, but there could be no sub-categories. This long-running annoyance has finally been been vanquished with Joomla 1.6. It uses only categories (no more sections!), and they can be nested as deeply as you want. I’m sure at some point someone will nest a category 666 levels down, and run into a terrible bug there … but in theory it should be fine, because a category would simply be assigned to a parent category .. the number of sub-levels should have no bearing on it.

Drupal has of course supported nested categories for a long time, where they are called Taxonomy. I think Drupal’s Taxonomy is still more advanced than Joomla 1.6′s category system, but for many, perhaps most users, just having nested categories is en0ugh. Those who want to do more advance PHP magic will naturally be more inclined towards Drupal anyway, and to words like Taxonomy.

The elimination of Joomla’s sections does mean that template code that relies on section IDs will have to be changed to be 1.6-compatible. It will have to check for category IDs instead. It also opens up an interesting possibility of (for example) using a database query to select only those categories that are nested within the current category. That could come in handy in displaying category ‘blogs’ or headlines in a more automated fashion than creating menu links. And speaking of menu links;

Menu Management

Joomla’s menu management has gotten very slick;

• Changing the menu type is now faster.
• Much more control over the menu items: meta data, page titles, robot rules, page class styling,  menu link title & CSS attributes.
• Module assignment from a menu item. You can still assign modules to menu items, but now you can also do this from the menu item itself, rather than having to edit the module separately.
• Batch processing multiple menu items
• Language filtering; show your menu item only for certain languages, or for all of them. Would be nice if you could select several languages and hide it on others, but that may be coming.
• Set template style

Redirect manager

Joomla 1.6 has a new component for managing URL redirects. Presumably this writes to the .htaccess file and created a 301 redirect.

Banner Manager

This is not too different from the 1.5 version, but features “Tracks”, which tracks clicks and impressions in date-filterable and CSV-exportable fashion. Finally we will be able to do some more robust reporting.

I am however baffled that banner clients still have no way to log in and view their banner’s statistics. I think most clients would want that, and offering that ability will help site owners gain more advertisers.

I wrote a Joomla 1.5 hack that got around this by using the “alias” field of the banner client to hold a username. That allows us to associate a banner client with a username, and then we can use that to display banner statistics to a given Joomla user (and only that user). Looks like I will have to port that hack to 1.6. Sigh.

Well, after trying out various solutions besides OpenX, I thought to myself 2 hours ago, “why can’t I just use Contact field in thebanner client area and enter a Joomla username, and then write a custom model for com_banners to display the statistics if the current Joomla user is the same as the one listed as the contact for a client?”

So that’s what I did. It is actually two queries. #1 checks the current username and selects all clients with that username (should be just one .. I limited it to one in the query), and selects the correct cid (client id). #2 selects all active banners for a given cid and spits them out, showing the banner, clicks, impressions, and CTR. I also added in some custom HTML to display a PayPal button … ideally this should be done in a View, not a Model, but the Banners component doesn’t seem to follow the MVC structure 100% so I didn’t either.

I did have to modify a few other files. Here are my modifications – this is on Joomla 1.5.18 but should work for any 1.5 release.

It’s as easy as 1-2-3;

1.

/components/com_banners/controller.php:

Add this after the end of function click():
</p> <div><p><span style=”color: #0000ff;” mce_style=”color: #0000ff;”>function bannerstats(){</p> <p>$model = &$this->getModel( ‘Bannerstats’ );</p> <p>$model->bannerstats();</p> <p>}</p> <p></span></div> <p>

2.

/components/com_banners/bannerstats.php
This is a new file – containing this code:

3.

/components/com_banners/models/bannerstats.php

This is a new file containing this code:

You can then create a link in the User Menu pointing to index.php?option=com_banners&amp;task=bannerstats.

It will detect the current logged-in user’s username, check the “contact” field of the banner clients, and select the active banners for that client. Needless to say, the contact field should contain that person’s username and nothing else, or it will not work.

In the future maybe there can be a special field allowing us to choose a username or enter one, instead of using the Contact field which is not really meant for that. I had considered making this a separate component, but it is really something I would like to see become part of the regular com_banners component.

Feedback is welcome – as far as I can tell this is secure and works, but others may have a better idea about that.

It’s a wonderful invoicing tool, offering smooth integration with Basecamp, online payment for your customers, and even snail mail for those times you need to mail an invoice the old-fashioned way. Using Authorize.net you can also set up recurring payments.

For example, Skype offers a status button to display a user’s Skype status. That relies on a JavaScript file that resides on Skype’s servers and is only available over an HTTP connection. So, to use this on an all-SSL site, you’d probably need to put it inside an iframe.

I suppose Chrome’s developers might think that if one page on a site contains such content, they’d better keep warning the user about other pages on that site too, even though the other pages do not contain mixed content. I would prefer tit actually be accurate.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.theirsite\.com[NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.theirsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Migrating a FrontPage site to Joomla

I recently migrated a site from FrontPage to Joomla. I used a very fancy migration tool called Copy & Paste. The site had only a handful of pages so this was no big deal. It just meant saving the graphics to Joomla’s images/stories folder, though even that can often be avoided.

The new Joomla site is not yet live, but I have already turned on SEF (search engine friendly) URLs, which entails an .htaccess file as provided by Joomla. The problem is, FrontPage also uses .htaccess, and whenever you update the FrontPage login credentials, it overwrites the file, rather than updating it and leaving the Joomla parts intact. This means that each time the FrontPage credentials are updated, the Joomla parts have to be added back in. The thing is, with cPanel you can add redirects to htaccess and it will not remove anything from the file. Apparently FrontPage is not capable of this, and takes a more crude approach of simple overwriting the whole thing. It is a minor nuisance, and I suppose I could just wait until the site actually goes live to do the final updates on the file!!

FreshBooks is a wonderful invoicing tool, offering smooth integration with Basecamp, online payment for your customers, and even snail mail for those times you need to mail an invoice the old-fashioned way. Using Authorize.net you can also set up recurring payments.

You can track time within Basecamp if you go with their Plus plan or higher, or you can track time in FreshBooks itself. If you use Basecamp, there are great extras such as  Project Recon for time tracking (with a timer). FreshBooks itself also offers stopwatch-style timers.

If you track your time in Basecamp, as I do, you can easily synchronize that with FreshBooks. In Basecamp you simply enter tasks in a to-do list and then log time by clicking on the little clock icon. You have to type in the time spent, i.e. “3.75″ or “3:45″. This is a slight nuisance, which can be alleviated by using Project Recon’s stopwatch approach.  I have noticed that the time log entries in Basecamp need to contain a meaningful description, which seems like extra work for  no good reason, when there’s already a to-do item that should contain descriptive text.

When adding time for a to-do, I don’t want to have to enter a Description. The Description should default to whatever the text for the To-do is. I am using Freshbooks, and if I simply import the time without adding a description to the time entry in Basecamp, the invoice line items in Freshbooks look like this:

[Some Project 05/18/10]

The Basecamp people (37signals) let me know they will take my suggestion into consideration, but until then the name of the game is to copy and paste the to-do text into the time log entry’s description … an unnecessary pain, I would think. I do hope they fix it.

The irony here is that the bigger companies get, the more you’d expect them to have internal QA processes in place, however if they opened up the floodgates and let just anyone contact them, it would be unmanageable. It would be great if they could rely on regular user feedback for improvements, but I suppose they can’t afford the required staff … but in this case QA missed this one, apparently.

I did finally figure out how to contact them, by logging into Skype.com and then going to Help, Related, Get more help. However, that still offers no mechanism for reporting bugs or other feedback.

You have an existing company web site with well over 100 pages, and it uses a MySQL database. For argument’s sake, let’s say it runs Joomla. Now suppose you have a product and have recently re-branded it, and now it has a new name. It appears in 300 places in various pages. How can you quickly replace all those instances?

Using this query in phpMyAdmin;

UPDATE jos_content SET introtext = REPLACE(introtext,’Old Product Name’,'New Product Name’);

UPDATE jos_content SET introtext = REPLACE(introtext,’Old Product Name’,'New Product Name’);

UPDATE jos_modules SET introtext = REPLACE(introtext,’Old Product Name’,'New Product Name’) WHERE module=’mod_custom’;

That should take care of 99% of those instances.

Of course, BACK UP before running this query! You can do that in phpMyAdmin by clicking the Export tab at the top (when you are viewing your database). I always select the option for Complete Inserts and Extended Inserts, and Save as File. You may also need to select the tables you want to export. If it is a very large database, it may make sense to choose “gzipped” (for gzip compression).  It offers much better compression than zip.

Many web hosting control panels offer phpMyAdmin. In cPanel, there should be a section called Databases, with phpMyAdmin listed as one of the icons. Click that to manage your existing databases, and then select the one you need to edit – on the left. To run the query, click the SQL tab at the top and paste the query, and click Go (on the bottom right).

Using queries such as the one above can potentially save many hours of work, if done right and done carefully.

There is a commercial Joomla component (here) that does the same thing as the above query, except I’m not sure if it also processes module text. However, performing database queries such as this one really do require backing up the database beforehand, and although there are Joomla add-ons that allow for easy database backup within the administrator interface, I think for redundancy and simply being safe rather than sorry, you also need to back up via phpMyAdmin, and if possible also grab a backup from cPanel (choose the “Home Directory” backup). So then you may as well run the query yourself in phpMyAdmin. If you’re uncomfortable doing that, try running the query on a copy of the site first, perhaps using XAMPP on your personal computer.