Following in Jen's footsteps on her recent rant about dropdown menus, it's time I got something off my chest about programming styles and standards. There are many levels of coding standards. But the one I'm on a tear about today involves writing Joomla! 1.5 extensions.

I was asked to look into an issue regarding an extension we are using here at 4Web. This is the first time I've looked into the code and I was pretty disappointed at what I saw. One of the reasons I so love writing extensions for J!15 is because the core team has done what I consider a fabulous job of creating a flexible, organized, easily understandable (even by me!) extremely extensible structure and API for creating components, plugins and modules. It has been rare (and increasingly so) in my thirty eight years of experience to find code this well structured.

Programming is, or can be, an art. We each have a style and an approach to coding unique to ourselves. And if we're paying attention, our own style evolves. Heck, half the time I look at code I wrote five years ago and can't figure what in the world I was thinking. Looking at someone else's code can be a nightmare of galactic proportion. This creates difficulties in maintaining code and is one reason standards have come to be seen as important in some circles.

Of course, the Seattle PI has published something from 5 years ago, but it's still very interesting reading.

One of the more exciting improvements in Joomla! 1.5 is the idea of template overrides. Joomla! templates can be thought of as a wrapper for displaying content produced by the various Joomla! components, modules and plugins/mambots. If you've ever created your own template, you know that there is special code you place throughout it to display that content. You can carefully create html according to your own exacting standards, but the results of all those modules in the left position, for example will still produce whatever html those modules were programmed to produce.

So let's say you've decided to create a website that does not use all those nested tables. You could create a Joomla! template that is all divs and no tables, but the individual Joomla! extensions will still be outputting those pesky nested tables.

With modules, you at least have the choice of using the tableless 'xhtml' style. But here again, the style attribute only tells Joomla! how to wrap the content produced by the module. The module itself may still be outputting table tags that you would rather not see used.

The Phrase Long-Term Solution seems like it should be a bit backwards for the world of technology. With technology changing so quickly, how can anyone really look to the future?

Well, I would say that if your web developer is not asking you the right questions and helping you look down the road, then you are getting  short-sighted  service. Of course what is implemented today will be changing down the road, but the overall purpose of that technology should still be the same. 

 Here are a few questions your developer should be asking of you:

If you're not using Firefox regularly for your day-to-day web surfing, you should be.

And if you're not using Firefox as a web developer, you're really missing out on a lot of great features.

Joomla wouldn't be nearly so much fun without the Web Developer Toolbar extension for Firefox. Go download it now, and then come back to read about why it's great.

The WDT has several great features that will really make your life easier with Joomla. The biggest of these is the CSS editing tools under the CSS menu. Simply choose "edit CSS", and you can edit the CSS for your Joomla page while watching, in real time, what your changes are doing (or not doing!).

Crossposted from my Joomla class discussion:

Some of you have been very interested to discuss dropdown menus (also called flyout menus) on your websites.

By "dropdown menus", we're talking about the list of links that show up as subnavigation for a given piece of your website. Roll over the link for "about", for example, and you see a list of links for Mission, Vision, Board, Senior Management, History, etc.

Bill downloaded the latest version of JoomSuite Content and installed it and says it's working much better now.

But we're still pondering about whether we want to use it for our client, given that we get no support, and given that it's encrypted so Bill can't fix it on his own.

At our first Joomla! User Group New England meeting, Barrie North told us that JoomSuite Content was a great new component that was going to have a big impact on the way people used Joomla going forward. He said the JoomSuite guys were responsive, and while the product still had a few bugs, it looked like it was going to be great.

We were pretty excited, looking over the screenshots. Basically, you can use this component to create input forms for all types of content. You can flag content with multiple categories, essentially a "tagging" type of functionality, so you could slice and dice content a bunch of different ways. Best of all, they were offering a beta of the software for 39 euros, with a promised early May launch of the stable version, so we bought a copy to evaluate. We even had a client in mind to use this with.

Installation was pretty tough for this non-engineer. Lots of errors thrown in the process, but Bill helped me get through all of that. Then we had to request a license from them once the initial install was done -- which took them 5 days to get back to us.

It is well known that the media manager, fabulous as it is, has a history of quirky and difficult problems. As we moved our sites to our new server, I found another fun one.

Do I really need to answer that one? Well, I will answer my own rhetorical question despite the fact that I am sure you already know... because the only place people are driving these days are to the web!

Before anyone is getting in their car to drive, they are considering the need and purpose of that trip. Clearly, the price of gas has everyone thinking twice about driving anywhere. It affects where they go and when, whether or not they REALLY need to go there in the first place, and which car they will take.

These are tough times for many, but it doesn't mean people can stop living. We still have houses to heat, kids to feed and businesses to run. These are the times that force us to consider our current business models and marketing strategies. If you consider it a time to really look towards the future, then your web presence might be the best place to invest.