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 time. By the time I came along they had graduated to using was really not much more than a spreadsheet on steroids. A very rudimentary database system some board member had created in her idle moments.

They had developed ways of thinking about their processes and data that had evolved over decades based on their paper system. And that was translated into the board member's simplistic application. Conversations initially involved them telling me very specifically what my new program needed to do. But as I would look into simply doing what they told me, I would find a number of questions that needed asking. And as I asked questions, they (and I) started to see that what they wanted was actually a solution to a more interesting problem and not at all the best way to address that problem. With practice and attention, it has become almost second nature for me to recognize the difference.

I really love Joomla! User Group New England. We meet the 3rd Wednesday of each month. And it's amazing what happens when you put so many intelligent people in one room -- the problems we solve!

Earlier that day, I was working on a site that had just been upgraded to Joomla 1.5.8. I noticed that a script tag I had included in a piece of content was getting stripped out when I saved the article.

Step 1: examine the wysiwyg pro settings. Wysiwyg Pro is our prefered editor for Joomla, as its usability is awesome for our clients. Of course, it hadn't been stripping out the script tag before, so why was it going now?

As they say, reputation is everything. And while there's an opportunity to make a great impression with a beautiful website, there are plenty of things you can do that will turn off your visitors.

Sites should be quick to load, easy to use, get your visitor in to the information they require and get them out. It's that simple. Sites like this let visitors know that the organization respects their time. The organization wants to help the visitor get great customer service — even if they've spoken to no one directly.

But long intro movies, badly designed forms, poor layout, and confusing navigation will leave your visitors lost and confused.

We are thrilled to announce that we've launched a HUGE site we've been working on for the last few months, WineMaker Magazine.

WineMaker Magazine started in 1998, and it's about how to make wine at home, whether you start with fresh grapes, or whether you start with a kit.  The main goal for the website is to push subscriptions and sell back issues of the magazine.  The content surrounding that supports those goals.

Because the site supports a magazine, it should contain an issue-by-issue listing of all articles.  Some of these articles may be available online, while some articles might be listed, but purchasing a back issue is required to read it.

Once we had decided against using sh404sef, we were still left with the need to handle '404 Page Not Found' errors. Clear and explicit information on this wasn't particularly easy to find, so I thought I'd document how we did it here.

 In J!15, errors are normally handled by - surprise! - a template file. Look in the the system template folder for the file error.php. Standard J!15 error handling sends the user to this page for any unrecoverable error. Including 404 errors. If you copy this file to the root folder of your own template, you can then modify it to your needs.

In very simplified form, here is what we did:

Oh gosh! Been awhile since I wrote here.  We've been completely swamped by the impending launch of one of the most complex sites I've worked on. We're using a bunch of extensions with a variety of compliance to Joomla 1.5 coding standards. None of them perfect, but some pretty darn close.

Joomsuite has been a mixed blessing. Having the code encrypted makes it more difficult for me to be excited about it. The idea is fantastic, but I'm finding it's capabilities - at least for our purposes - quite limited. And it's buggy. And it has a long way to go to meet my standards for a fully Joomla 1.5 compliant extensions.

Given the desires of the client, and Joomsuite's limitations, I ended up writing a component to fill in the the gaps. This is where the blessing gets really mixed. I've been pretty surprised what I've been able to do, but it's created a number of nightmares for maintaining control over how and where to display content. But overall, I'm pretty impressed with some of the things I can do with Joomsuite and in the ways I've been able to get my component to cross-talk with it.