Blog entries

Thank you to everyone for making Joomla Day New England a success!

Jen Kramer — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 10:46:25 +0100

Joomla User Group New England is the nicest bunch of Joomies you'd ever hope to meet. And I'm the luckiest Joomie of them all, because I get to live here and work with them!

Thank you to all of our attendees. Some of you got up at 5 AM to drive from Boston to the middle of nowhere to sit in a hellishly hot auditorium all day, but left smiling, recharged, and happy.

Thank you, as always, to Marlboro College and Marlboro College Graduate School, for the free space, the support wit...

CMS Expo 2010: Beautiful women and tattoos!

Jen Kramer — Tue, 11 May 2010 13:29:23 +0100

Six beautiful Marlboro College Graduate School women attended CMS Expo, representing Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, and Massachusetts. Note the terrific tattoos everyone's wearing, including the penguin. We love Joomla!

Back row:

Barb Ackemann, MSIT '06 and current faculty member
Jen Kramer, ISM '01 and MSIT program director
Bernice Singley, MSIT '08
Heidi Stanclift, MSIT '08

Front r...

Social Networking at Joomla.org

Jen Kramer — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 13:49:07 +0100

Last night, the Joomla leadership announced that they were looking for request for comment on a social networking community to reside at Joomla.org.

We know it will either be called social.joomla.org or people.joomla.org. We know that it's been decided that JomSocial will run the community.

We are asked for input about whether this is something we'd use, what we want included, and how we think we'd use it.

Does anyone see a problem with that? We have the URL all pic...

Joomla 1.6 Admin Template Is Done

Jen Kramer — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 12:31:13 +0100

I am amazed at the people suddenly wanting to redesign the Joomla 1.6 administrator interface.

First of all, good for you. There's generally no controversy that Joomla's admin needs redesign. The 1.0 to 1.5 interface made some nice changes, but there's definitely more that can be done.

Second of all, you all know that Joomla 1.6 beta was due out in August 2009? And that most recently, the beta was due out in March 2010? So it's a little late to be getting on board to be "the des...

Best Business Decision Made: Attending CMS Expo

Jen Kramer — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 23:28:36 +0100

I have been designing and developing websites for 10 years now, but my company, 4Web Inc., has only been around for 2 years. (Prior to that, I ran a freelance company, Focused Consulting LLC.)

Back in 4Web's infancy, my colleagues attended the very first CMS Expo in May 2008. (I was at Adobe headquarters for an Adobe User Group Manager summit and could not attend.) Back then it was a Joomla conference mostly. The networking was great, though, and my colleagues got to meet a lot o...

VOXUS's first PR problem for Joomla

Jen Kramer — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:54:37 +0100

I believe that Joomla is the best open source content management system out there today. It's powerful but adaptable. You don't need to know PHP to use it and accomplish amazing things with it. If you do know PHP, you can do just about anything with it. It's been downloaded over 15 million times.

But as Bill Tomczak says, there used to be two TV recording formats: Beta and VHS. Everyone knew Beta was "better". But VHS eventually won the day.

"Holy Wars" have always been with us ...

Alternative Joomla Administrator Templates and Dancing Bears

Jen Kramer — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:17:27 +0100

Dancing Bear Syndrome is a term coined by Jared Spool and Alan Cooper (among others in the usability community). Someone says, "Look! A dancing bear!" And you are amazed! The bear is dancing! How cool is that?

Of course, bears don't dance well. It's just amazing that they dance at all. The novelty of it all is what catches our attention, not the quality of the dancing.

Alternative Joomla administrator templates are dancing bears.

First off, what is a Joomla admin template...

Come see me at CMS Expo!

Jen Kramer — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:48:50 +0100

I'm the Joomla Track Leader at the CMS Expo conference, happening May 3-5, 2010, in Evanston, IL (outside of Chicago). I am so excited to be back for my 3rd Expo conference!

This time, I'll be presenting the Joomla SiteBuilder sessions, where you'll learn secrets about putting Joomla sites together and styling them.

Ex...

On the importance of excellent web hosting for Joomla

Jen Kramer — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:58:07 +0100

This is a topic covered in my recent book, but the question comes up all the time.

In the early static days of the web, there was really little difference between one host and another. You uploaded a bunch of HTML pages and images (and later a CSS file or two) and the web host just worked. There wasn't a lot of analysis to do for the average small business site. One host was pretty much as good as another.

Now we're working with Joomla. And now, when it comes to hosting, everyth...

Chapter 15: Site Maintenance and Training

Jen Kramer — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:52:25 +0100

Chapter 15 of my new book is available for you to explore! It covers all of the usual post-launch issues, including ongoing site maintenance, upgrades, backups, and training your client how to use Joomla.

Download Chapter 15 here (PDF)

Preparing CMS Web Graphics Using Open Source Tools

Jen Kramer — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:22:40 +0100

My video is now available at Lynda.com. Check out this free clip at YouTube!

Why are web professionals SO expensive?

Jen Kramer — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 18:29:12 +0100

What's your rate? Everyone asks that question. The typical going rate for a web developer in my area -- the professionals, the ones who make their living doing this stuff -- generally ranges from $70 to $125 per hour, depending on skillset. Most seem to lie in the $75 to $100/hr range.

WOW, you say. WOW is that expensive! Perhaps even excessive! Man, you must live the lifestyle of the rich and famous. You must never worry about money. You're too expensive to hire. I know this guy, the ...

Using the menu alias function in Joomla

Jen Kramer — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 00:04:55 +0100

Sometimes you want to create more than one link to a given item in your Joomla site. Let's say you have an article that you want to show up as subnavigation under Item A and Item B on your menu.

You could create two identical articles, linking one to Item A and the other to Item B. We used to do that in the static HTML days. Unfortunately, that generally meant that you had a maintenance nightmare, since when the page's content changed, you had to change it in two places.

With Jo...

Creating hidden menus in Joomla

Jen Kramer — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 00:01:24 +0100

Every once in a while, you might want to create links on your website that aren't directly linked to one of the menus displayed on your website.

A great way to accomplish this is to use a hidden menu. Here's how to do it.

1. Go to the back end of Joomla and log in. Under Menus, pick Menu Manager. Click New to create a new menu. Call it hiddenmenu (all one word). Fill in "hiddenmenu" for the 4 blanks presented.

2. When a new menu is created, a module to go with the menu is...

Finding the top menu

Bill Tomczak — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:07:42 +0100

I was recently asked if there was a way to get the topmost menu item in which a page sits. Let's say you have a menu like this:

Item 1
--Item 1.1
--Item 1.2
----Item 1.2.1
Item 2
--Item 2.1
--Item 2.2

Let's say you wanted to do something special with all the menus in the 'Item 1' tree and something slightly different for all the items in the 'Item 2' tree. You'd want to know which tree you were on. Here is a bit of simple php code you can use ...

Two new titles for Lynda.com in the can, and other news

Jen Kramer — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:12:18 +0100

I just got back from a great week at Lynda.com, recording two more titles, hopefully out soon.

The first title is "CMS Website Strategy and Planning", and it covers all of the things you should think about and talk about with your client before building your website.

The second title is "Preparing CMS Web Graphics Using Open Source Tools". It covers how to think about a good design for a CMS as well as create an HTML page using GIMP for graphics and KompoZer for writing th...

What's your problem?

Bill Tomczak — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:35:04 +0100

We've been working on a rather largish site recently and over the course of recent weeks, I have been reminded of a lesson learned way back in my dark ages when I was designing desktop database applications.

When developing any application but especially a customized application designed for a specific person or company, it can be easy to confuse problems with solutions. In that database I designed so many years ago, the client had been doing things largely on paper for a very long tim...

Usability is everywhere

Jen Kramer — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:22:47 +0100

Everywhere you look, usability problems exist everywhere.

Sometimes those usability problems are a direct result of branding.

Let's take this example. Health insurance! Now, there's plenty of usability problems in the health insurance industry, but I want to focus on one tiny little problem, a direct result of branding conflicting with usability.

In the US, if you have health insurance, you get a card that describes your health insurance plan, account numbers, group numbe...

Jon Stewart Critiques GOP.com

Jen Kramer — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:30:07 +0100

Know your target audience! And do a little testing before you launch.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

You've Got Fail

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

I have seen the light (suphp)

Bill Tomczak — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:43:38 +0100

Recently, based on recommendations from Jen and myself, another web designer of note moved her hosting to Liquidweb. I'm sorry to say she had an agonizing period of adjustment. It was all about the dreaded file permissions and ownership.

In Mambo and J10, it was often necessary to set certain files and directories to be writable by anyone. Due to the way web servers have traditionally been set up, the only way a system like Joomla could upload files and modify the website's directory s...