Brian Teeman

Handing over a web site to a client is always a satisfying feeling but is it always finished?

Of course you should always aim to complete everything on the client's brief and to their specifications but are there times when it is best to hand over the site when you still have some work to do?

Recently I have found more and more that I am handing over web sites that are perhaps only 90% complete or that have temporary solutions in place.

Wow - its been a year since the last release of Joomla 1.0!

Whilst all new development has taken place in the 1.5 and soon to be released 1.6, Joomla 1.0 is officially still a "live release" for a few more months now.

So what does this mean?

Well to me at least it means that the joomla 1.0 codebase is rock solid with no known security issues for 365 days.

There aren't many open source content management systems, or any open source software projects, that can say that.

Or are there?

I don't know why but in the last few weeks I have seen a growing number of extension developers write code like this.

if (!is_dir($dstdir)) {
mkdir($dstdir);
chmod($dstdir, 0777);
}

It is hard enough educating users not to do this without extension developers doing it for them.

There is no need ever to chmod 777 anything!!

It is time to say thank you to the uncredited photographers who provided all the images included in joomla (and mambo before that).

I've been thinking for a while that I really should say thank you to these photographers who never recieved any credit for their work.

On Sunday Jan 25 at 02:22:29 Rob Schley ended an era and removed the images from images/stories for Joomla 1.6 and Steve Burge listed these images in his Top ten things to explain to joomla learners.

Do we need vowels in order to read effectively?

Neither arabic or hebrew use vowels in common use so are they really necessary?

Does our brain automaticaly fill in the missing information for us?

Almost exactly one year ago I started work redesigning a large, complex and very un-friendly joomla 1.0 web site.

The site had been built in a rush and had grown rapidly with thousands of pages and a very poor navigational structure.

Users were regularly complaining that they could not find important information even though we knew it was there.

As a source of information it faired badly and the general impression was that it was disorganised and unprofessional and not a good representation of the organisation.

The web site may be nearly 2 years old now but Charles Darwin would be 200 today.

I am confident that he would be amazed at the evolution of technology since his birth that has led to his entire collection of correspondence becoming accessible to everyone on his very own joomla website.

The Darwin Correspondence Project was founded in 1974 by an American scholar, Frederick Burkhardt, with the aid of Sydney Smith, a zoologist at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Joomla is great but I bet everyone has their own set of extensions that they always install on a site, I know I do.

This will either mean that you have to spend extra time installing them before you can get started on the real work or that you have built your own custom joomla install.

I've built several of them myself in the past and they must have saved me tens of hours.

It's relatively easy to do it but is in itself time consuming and of course you have to ensure that you keep all of the constituent parts up to date.

No I haven't gone mad and got my calendar wrong I really am talking about Easter Eggs. But not the nice chocolate type we get here in the UK or the painted bird eggs more common in the USA.

Instead I'm talking about the hidden, often undocumented, commands buried inside software, dvd and even web sites.

Usually they are just an exercise in a talented programmer having a joke at their boss, but sometimes they can provide extra and useful functions.

And sometimes they strip a joomla designer naked!!

Every year Linux Journal magazine conducts its Readers' Choice Awards which is an open poll to "take the current pulse of the Linux Community".

Vote for the software you use every day in your work and play and deserve to be acknowledged with this prestigious honour.

The polls are open until February 14th and give joomla a Valentine's Day present.

Please respect the magazine and only vote once.