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.
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!!
On January 22nd 2008 Joomla! 1.5 was first released to the world. It's hard to believe that joomla is now one year old.
It was a long time coming but for me at least the wait was worthwhile. Without the flexibility and power of 1.5 I would never have been able to produce complex sites like www.reformjudaism.org.uk and www.mitzvahday.org.uk or this blog.
Is your admin interface in joomla secure?
Could you make it more secure?
Could Joomla itself force some extra security?
It's an interesting question that I've been pondering over the last few weeks.
What is a joomla extension?
When does an extension become an application?
I've never used the Joomla "polls" component before so I was suprised today to realise that there is no option to disable the "results" button.
However you use a voting system it's results are always dependant on the number of participants in the vote. Or perhaps I should more accurately say in politic-speak the election turnout.
"Not a lot of people know this" but in 1990 I was lucky enough to be filmed as an extra in Star Trek.
Whilst I was a fan of the show I wouldn't go as far to say I was an addict, still it was fun to get the full Hollywood special effects make-up treatment.
Sadly we weren't allow to take photographs and even I can't recognise myself in the relevant episode.
But the event always stayed in my mind so when the push to "internationalise" joomla began I purchased a Klingon-English dictionary so that joomla would not only be available in every language on earth but in every known language.
Happy New Year to you all.
Of course I'm not really so sad as to be sat typing this blog post at midnight on New Years Day. It's actualy 15:53 on the 29th and I'm using the "Start Publishing" feature of joomla.
