comments

more

Flevoziekenhuis

31 March 2010 - 00:53

Earlier this year I've redesigned the templates of the Flevoziekenhuis. The old templates really needed an update. This assignment was granted very late in the process of introducing the new corporate identity. The Flevoziekenhuis hospital building was already decorated with the new logo. And print communications and other media outings were already branded according to the new style designed by Different View. So when I got the assignment as 2Value associate, we had less then a month from initial talks to launch.

And next to visuals we had to make some navigational and accessibility improvements which lacked in the previous templates. I completely overhauled the navigation structure. I cut the amount of menus and modules by about 80%. I also took care of the Joomla 1.5 legacy mode. The website now runs fully native. Most of all, the new templates validate in xhtml 1.0 strict doctype (except for some third party remote included code). All in all the new templates and site structure are a major improvement in accessibility and maintainability. Plus, it looks a lot better and loads faster.

IBG Makelaars

12 February 2010 - 15:55

The Independent Brokers Group is a large collective of real estate agents. Three of those agents asked 2Value to build their new website:

In a joined effort with fellow 2Value associates Kor Dwarshuis and Nathan Waelkens, we created a set of nearly identical, but individually brandable websites. Ten Hag was the first to adopt the new structure and styling of their site. The sites all feature an open source CMS coupled with open source Realty software. All in a clear and simple new layout. We also built a connection to Funda, the largest Dutch real estate website.

Joomla-dagen 2010

1 February 2010 - 18:06

I'll be attending the Dutch Joomla Days. This year the event takes place on 23rd and 24th of April in Utrecht.
Joomla!dagen Nederland, 23 en 24 April 2010, Utrecht

Henstra Advies en Ondersteuning

21 November 2009 - 12:05

Harm Henstra is a coach and interim manager based in Haarlem. He needed a small, straightforward website to present himself and his services. So rapidly I put up a new Joomla installation. After a short planning meeting Harm wrote most of the content in his new website. I structured it and filled the site. We jointly choose a stock template and I adapted the colours and feel to his corporate identity. Next, we put up the "pawn" images and portraits to finish the global layout. Finally I gave a small instruction on how to use Joomla to manage the content in the website. In under two days the website was finished. The resulting website is clean, easy to navigate and reflects the "game" theme of Harm Henstra's method.

HTML style guide

16 September 2009 - 14:49

When designing websites graphic designers often draw a neat picture in photoshop. The day to day use of a website greatly differs from this ideal scenario. The design shows a calm and readable site with demo text. But the actual website in use everything but serene and readable. The text style is usually the first aspect of a site that gets diluted. Both users and visitors create content or leave comments which just don't fit the initial picture painted by the designer. A lot of problems stem from the use of wysiwyg editors in content management systems. These editors usually grant their users a lot more freedom than a web designer wants. A properly configured wysiwyg editor should greatly limit the possibilities of the user to a few essential functions such as creating lists, inserting links and marking text as strong or emphasised.

However, many a time such wysiwyg editors are incorrectly configured. If users have too many text formatting options the result is text corruption. Because of their limited knowledge of html code, users mess up semantics, introduce a diversity of text styles, insert many incorrect tags and a plethora of inflated code and inline styles. The more creatively inclined user seems to have an urge to colour pieces of text, raise the text size, insert alternate fonts and create unused or endlessly nested tables into the content of your carefully designed site. Once users start copying and pasting from MS Word they introduce a visual cacaphony which seriously breaks the visual appease of your site. Sometimes it can even break the basic layout of your site and hinder search indexation.

JRoute and module visibility

12 September 2009 - 20:04

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:

Syndicate content Stay up to date with the rss feed.