Articles

Thanks to this tweet by webchick, I enrolled for a Drupal Association membership.

I'll be attending the Dutch Joomla Days. This year the event takes place on 23rd and 24th of April in Utrecht.

Correct SEF routing in Joomla is pretty easy thanks to the class JRoute. If you want to redirect to a clean url just use the basic method _(); like so:

JRoute::_('index.php?option=com_example&task=view');

Unfortunately, this method isn't aware of url aliases created in menu items. JRoute just alters a dirty url like /index.php?option=com_example&task=view in a clean url like /components/example/view. Let's say you've created menu item to this components task with the alias: /view-example. JRoute doesn't redirect to the alias, just to the cleaned up system url. This is a problem because menu items are essential if you want to define page parameters or module visibility. These parameters are only visible if the url matches exactly. If you want to create redirects to url aliases in your Joomla modules or components you can try the following snippet.

$menu =& JSite::getMenu();
$menu_items = $menu->_items;
foreach($menu_items as $item) {
    $match = 0;
    if($item->query['option'] == 'com_example')    $match = $match+1;
    if($item->query['task'] == 'view') $match = $match+1;
 
    $matches[$match] = $item->route;
}
if(key_exists(1, $matches)) {
    array_shift($matches);
    array_reverse($matches, false);
 
    $action_url = JRoute::_(JUri::base(true).'/'.$matches[0]);
}

This will create a path to a single alias created in a menu item if a matching menu item exists. You can also do this for other components by specifying the match criteria. For example:

Codeculture.nl just got a bit better. The site was (and still is) in dire need of some tweaks to the interface. There were a couple of problems that needed addressing:

1. I wasn't happy at all with the placement of the search box, it just took too much space and broke the flow of the first lines on the front page. Also I wanted to include the search box on every page and remove the search option from the main menu.
2. The breadcrumbs looked dull and were hard to read on the striped background under the header.
3. I started colour coding the pages with a simple rotator, so you get a fresh look if you refresh the page. However I didn't fully implement this. In the near future I'll probably dump the rotator and use the colour codes to brand specific pages.
4. I found the main menu font colour to be a little too light. Click stats affirm this.
5. There were some very serious cross browser issues (well, IE issues really, but let's be kind on microsoft for a change). There still are some problems especially with IE7, but at least the site functions properly on all major browsers.
6. The project thumbnails on both the project gallery and the project nodes were inconsistent and badly delineated.