Joomla 1.5 – HTML5 Template Starting Point

Posted on 28. Aug, 2010 by Rick.

After staring in awe at Paul Irish’s HTML5 boilerplate, I quickly decided it was genius and wanted to get a starting point for any future Joomla projects where we at XID deem html5 ok to use (which from this point on should be most).  I took a few minutes and redid / added some Joomla-esque requirements (such as the head jdoc, correct paths to the files for a J! template, etc.).

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Tutorial Video: Converting a Joomla 1.5 Template to 1.6

Posted on 06. Jul, 2010 by Rick.

I made a casual video this evening on converting a J! 1.5 template to J! 1.6.  I hadn’t practiced or rehearsed this video at all before the recording because I wanted to see just how easy it would be and how much time it would take to get it done.

Surprisingly, it took just a few minutes to port the Usability template, found on this site, over to 1.6.  The biggest caveats that I ran in to were the template params being renamed “fields” and “fieldset”s and the template overrides changing.  I didn’t dig in to the template overrides yet but a quick glance told me they are the biggest change.  Below is a video with my findings, enjoy! (don’t forget to turn on HD to watch it in it’s best quality!)

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CMS Expo 2010 Highlights

Posted on 07. May, 2010 by Rick.

The Expo was the best technical conference I have attended to date.  I have been to a few smaller, meet-up type conferences, FOWA (Future of Web Apps) Miami, and the CMS Expo ’09.  Apart from last year’s CMS Expo (CMSX), the others I did not enjoy.  You might think I am bias but I feel, after the second year attending, that the CMSX brings a much more attractive approach to the traditional “web” conference and for three reasons:  1) It’s a social event, 2) Actual business goes on, and 3) The strong point is the small sessions.

It is a social event

Ironically, the last FOWA conference I attended was about all aspects of social web apps however no social interaction went on!  After the main speakers gave their lectures everyone went to the four corners of the auditorium and digressed to the great social past-time of glaring at a computer screen.  There was very little human interaction or stimulation.  Contrast that with the CMS Expo, people interacted with each other all day long (and all night long too).  At one point, Kyle Ledbetter, from JoomlaPraise came over to a group of us and said “Alright guys let’s talk about something cool.  Forget this technical talk…we do that on Skype…”.

The point is, CMSX is not just a great place for a technical conference but a haven for all those that need assurance there is life outside of geekdom.

Actual business goes on

At previous conferences I’ve attended, very little business went on and if it did it was one-sided.  To be fair, it’s probably because most the attendees at other conferences were not business people.  I venture to say that the majority of the CMSX attendees are business owners or people with drive to start a business.  The multi-faceted purpose of the expo really lends itself to not just small breakout meetings regarding the latest technology or development standards but engaging debates and conversations on running a web business, or selling software, or how to scale your business (not just your server).  I learned just as much about business as I did anything technical.

The small sessions are the strong point

In other conferences I’ve attended, the main events were the large keynotes.  The CMSX had a handful of general talks, such as Dries Buytaert’s inspiring rally for the Open Source community.  However, the real gem of the expo is in it’s small sessions.  The sessions are not an after thought like many conferences but rather the focus.  It offered a wide range of sessions for it’s attendees.  For coders that need to sharpen their business wit, there was a business tract.  For those looking to broaden their services to another CMS, they had opportunity to get good training in CMSs such as Drupal, Joomla, Plone, and WordPress.   There were even some good overview sessions for lesser known CMSs such as EZPublish.

As someone who typically is skeptical at the value of conferences, I can highly recommend the CMS Expo to anyone.  Plan on attending next year!

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ECWID Shopping Cart Joomla Extensions

Posted on 22. Feb, 2010 by Rick.

Recently I was introduced to a new hosted shopping cart solution called ECWID. I played with it for about 10 minutes and really liked the idea behind it. I was also surprised how fast it loaded the hosted cart. I was able to whip out several extensions for Joomla that help integrate the cart…
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Override Core jQuery Methods

Posted on 10. Dec, 2009 by Rick.

A recent conversation with some developers brought up a question I’d never contemplated before: Can jQuery core methods be overridden? Well, in short: Easily, yes!

From perusing the web, it looks like there are several approaches to doing this. Below is an example I wrote up quickly, to test out the concept.
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