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.
Back in November I published a blog post "Where is the search?" in which I stated that the search button should be at the top right hand corner of your web site because "everyone else puts it there so that's where your user expects to look."
According to a recent survey of the Top 100 blogs at Technorati by Smashing Magazine 62% of sites have the search box in the top right corner of the site, just like here, with the majority of the rest placing it at the top of the right hand sidebar.
Today I found another reason.
There is currently a discussion on slashdot titled "Open Source Usability — Joomla! Vs. WordPress". In the article the author asks if either of these are better that the other for usability.
Unfortunately it has degenerated into the typical argument on slashdot, "my software is better than your software" with a smattering of people who once tried the software in the dim and distant past pronouncing judgement as if they are the ultimate authority.
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?
