Last week I blogged about creating a large form with complex validation rules using bfForms.
But what do you do if you want to add an existing html form to your joomla site?
Perhaps you have a form created in dreamweaver, or you have purchased a form from an on-line library, or even have a form created in microsoft word that you want to add to your site.
I spend a lot of my time training people new to joomla so I think, and hope, that I have a pretty good idea of the trials and tribulations that they face.
Looking at joomla for the first time can be, for some, a daunting prospect. With so many options and so much power and flexibility it is easy to be overwhelmed and quickly drop joomla in the trash.
Fear not, joomla help is easy to find.
You would think that is a stupid question. Of course every web master wants their site to be usable by the largest number of users. And no web master wants to break the law, and there are many laws around the world that attempt to create an equal playing field.
Yes it is true that to create some of the cooler aspects of a web site in an accessible manner can be very hard but there is NO EXCUSE at all for a site to missing ALT tags.
Yesterday I had to build a form for a new web site. But this wasn't the usual form with a handful of fields and a couple of required elements.
Oh no! This client required a form with almost 200 fields (194 to be exact), each field required validation, and there shouldn't be a single table element anywhere in the form.
Gregory House the grumpy doctor of TV fame specialises in solving the problems that no other doctor can.
Famously he says "All patients lie!".
Of course what he really means is that you shouldn't believe everything the patient says about their illness and symptoms as they do not have the skills to accurately describe them.
Patients also have a tendency to neglect to inform you of facts which seem irrelevant to them but are crucial to a successful diagnosis.
The same is true for supporting users!
Don't believe what you can't see with your own eyes!
I've hinted about this new uberextension before but now its here and available for download.
“climb every (Joomla!) mountain with K2”
In a recent blog post I talked about an extension under development that has really got me excited. And it takes quite a lot to get me excited these days!
Tonight I got a quick skype message from the author that the release is only hours away.
Patience may be a virtue but I've been waiting for this for a very long time now and the anticipation is really getting to me.
Every day I try to learn something new and today is no different.
Hopefully you are aware of the robots.txt file that comes with your joomla web site install and you might even have customised it to add more power and control.
The robots.txt file acts as a signpost to google and other search engine robots, telling which parts of your web site to index and which to ignore.
In advanced usage it can be used to serve slightly different content to the search engines, prevent images from being included in the google image index or even tell google the pages of your site to include in its mobile index.
But have you checked it is actually working?
I am not a fan of template clubs.
More and more the tendency for joomla template club designers is to showcase as many different things as possible that they can achieve in a Joomla template rather than concentrate on the best way to present the site owner's content.
When someone visits a site I have built, I don't want the first thing they think of to be "oh that is pretty" or "ooh look at that slide show". I want them to find the information that they came to the site for in the first place.
And of course I don't want them to think that the site looks familiar because they have seen the template before.
