2013 was a very quiet year for this blog but that is all changing in 2014.
Just because I was quiet here didn't mean I was quiet in the Joomla world, (do you really think I can ever be quiet?), as I tried to contribute in many new ways. For me some of those were successful others less so.
I have learnt new skills which I hope will I will be able to continue to improve. I definitely understand more code now than I ever did before and one day I will be able to completely stop asking friends for help.
So what's happening now?
This blog was created originally as my place on the net to freely express my opinions and views. Sometimes that got me into trouble, sometimes it fell on deaf ears and perhaps that contributed to my lack of desire to blog last year
Although I didn't publish much here I did actually write quite a lot, you just never saw it. Many times I sat down and wrote down my thoughts and opinions and just decided that was enough. I had expressed my frustrations and opinions in words and that was enough for me. I didn't need, or want, comments to validate my thoughts. It was enough for me just to express them to myself.
That's changing now and I'm committing myself to write at least twice a week and publish it! Will I succeed and keep to that schedule. Who knows? But I am going to try.
New Clothes
While the last template was great I felt like a change and for the first time I created it all by myself. (Another new skill acquired even if it is not quite ready for others consumption).
This template does not use any of the Joomla template club frameworks as they are all too bloated for me. It uses Bootstrap 3, thanks to the overrides from JooStrap, which was surprisingly easy to get my head around.
I have also made extensive use of JLayouts. This has saved me a lot of time as it reduced the amount of time I needed to customise the views. Instead of repeating code in multiple views I can just include a JLayout.
As someone whose programming and template skills are still "under development" using JLayout enabled me to overcome some of the Joomla quirks that have always bugged me. For example when you enable "article title links" in your blog view the titles are also links in the single article view. Having a link that goes back to itself is useless and always bugged me. With JLayouts it was easy for me to solve by duplicating the existing JLayout, removing the link, and including the modified version in the article view instead.
You found a bug in the template?
Congratulations!
It doesn't surprise me if you did. I've tested it on many devices but not all. I've found "issues" on some devices and decided not to fix some of them and some of them I don't have a clue how to resolve.
Do I care? Possibly. Will I do something about it? Maybe.
Good enough is the new perfect
