I thought IE7 was going to be the holy grail that brought global CSS compliance to the masses and made life for the average web designer once again worth living. What happened?!

I’ve been doing CSS development for a couple years now. My standard M.O. is to get the site working perfectly in Firefox, then tweak the CSS to make it IE5/6 friendly. The purpose for this, in theory, is that by developing for Firefox you can pretty much be sure that your code is standards compliant. If it looks good in Firefox, it should look pretty much the same in all standards-compliant browsers. Then you add little tweaks here and there to make it look good in the non-standards-compliant browsers (IE). I generally don’t worry about the smaller browsers – between Firefox and IE5/6 I am covering about 97-99% of the browsers out there, depending on whose stats you believe.

Ironically, I did not follow that procedure when developing my own site, as those of you using IE can attest to right now. Incidentally, today was the first day I actually looked at this site using IE6, and yeah, I was shocked at how mangled it is. So curiosity bit me and I fired up IE7 to see if it really is more standards compliant (as was promised). To my shock and dismay, the site does not look all that different than it does in IE6. But there are differences. I looked at another of my sites which I had perfected for both Firefox and IE5/6, and there were elements of the site that just did not line up right in IE7. This means I am going to need a new bag of tricks to get IE7 to look right without affecting IE5/6.

What is Microsoft trying to do to us?

I posted a couple weeks ago about Joomla.  Since I have now used Joomla on a couple sites, I’ve made a small wish-list of features that are missing from that particular CMS.  One of the most obvious ones is a granular permissions system.  I was eagerly awaiting the release of version 1.5 which just went beta yesterday.  However, the granular permissions which I thought might be there, did not appear to be.

So I’m on a mission to find the perfect CMS that can do everything.  It has to be free open source, php and mysql based, easy to set up a template, should have granular permissions.  Of course I want as many extras as possible.  Someone had pointed me toward something called “Harmony”, but after scouring Google, I cannot find any information about any CMS called “Harmony”.  Well, there was this, but I’m pretty sure that’s not it.

If you’re in the market for a CMS, I definitely recommend CMSMatrix.  They have categorized hundreds of free and commercial CMS packages, and there are a ton of search options.  My short list is Drupal, Sitellite, and Typo3.  I’ll be evaluating these three in the coming weeks and I’ll report back here.

I came across a post on 33′ Rockers by Karthik Kastury called the 10 Commandments of Web Design.  Very nice message, perhaps not inspired, but I agree with most of it.  Karthik is not the original author, he’s just an evangelist — spreading the word.  So I follow the link to the original site that the post came from.  Now that site looks like it follows most if not all of the commandments.  Very nice indeed – must be the Jewish synagogue.  But who is the author of the post?  Jim Edwards, author of the “MiniSiteCreator” — which he will tell you himself if you visit his website.  Aiiiyyee!!  That guy’s gotta be going to Hell.

Come on, don’t be offended.  It’s an analogy.  He’s the one that started with the biblical reference, I just carried it through to a logical conclusion.

Anyway, have a great weekend.

For the web developers out there: Do you regularly use a CMS framework in your projects?

First a little background about me
I’ve been developing websites seriously for about 6 years. I’m self-taught and have no formal training. I started out by learning HTML and table layouts — no CSS, no <DIV>’s, etc.

Pretty soon I began hearing some talk about server-side scripting and became interested in JSP. I had a short period of formal “C” training in my past, so I caught on to the Java syntax and language structure very quickly. However, for most of my clients, JSP was not a practical solution.

I started to notice that something called “PHP” was included in most hosting plans, and after some investigation discovered that it was a “lightweight” server-side scripting engine without all the overhead and server configuration required for JSP. So I dove right in and before long abandoned JSP entirely.

Then about a year ago I finally discovered the wonders of CSS and table-less layouts. What a liberation!

So up until about a month ago, my design process has been as follows: