Concrete5 Theme Installation Issues
Concrete5 Theme Installation Issues http://tinyurl.com/4h9yjgz
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.
Hey, wait, I’ve got a new complaint ..
Lately it seems we’ve been on a tear, complaining about other sites that are falling down on the job. There is a point to all this: test your sites in all major browsers.
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:
Delta.com issues with Google Chrome
Apparently, Delta.com needs to do a bit more extensive browser testing, because their dropdown menus appear in the wrong location when you use Google Chrome. It is a problem with their CSS positioning.
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.
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960 grid layout technique
Check out http://960.gs/ for a great way of creating layouts for 960-pixel wide designs.
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!
Anthem.com redesign critique
I use Anthem for my health insurance. Their old site left a lot to be desired, and I am glad to see attention being paid to the site. However, the new site is just bewilderingly unusable. It *looks* good, but it is unnecessarily complicated, inconsistent, and just “all over the place”. The criticism in this post is motivated by the fact that if I, a web developer, have trouble using their site, imagine the average non web developer user trying to use it. I was also simply incensed at the thought that Anthem probably spent untold millions developing this, when a better design could be developed up in a day or two. I can’t understand how it is possible for such a large health insurance company to get this so completely wrong.
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.
CSS3 Playground / Useful Site
Check out css3please.com. It’s a great place to try out all the wild and wonderful new CSS that’s possible with CSS3.
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Fixing Itemids for Joomla / K2's tag view
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
Joomla / K2; disabling modal image popups on some items
We are in the middle of designing a new version of plethoradesign.com using Joomla and K2. Most images in our web design portfolio have a large version that can be clicked and enlarged, but in some cases this was not desirable; for example for logos. There was no way to turn off this feature (not easily anyway), so it was time to add this option to K2.
Thanks to a post over at the K2 Forums, we customized our K2 installation so it is now possible to turn off the popup modal link on an item-by-item basis.
Download: k2-item-image-link-option.zip
Changed files;
administrator/com_k2/models/item.xml
components/com_k2/templates/default/item.php
The code in item.php is set up so items will show popup links on images by default, but if the item options have been set to disable the popup, it will not be linked.
Conditional CSS and ASP.net themes
ASP.net themes will be default load every CSS file found inside /App_Themes/your_theme/. If you have an IE7-only CSS file in there, that too will be loaded by default. That defeats the purpose, obviously.
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.
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