September 2009

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: