Three Times Daily » web development

Dispicable IE and neglectful web designers

Eric — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 16:16:43 +0000

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?

Finding the right CMS

Eric — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 18:29:31 +0000

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.

Fun stuff for a Friday

Eric — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 20:43:43 +0000

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.

CMS for web development

Eric — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 14:32:29 +0000

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

’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:

design page layout using graphical design software.
convert prototype image to valid HTML using CSS for layout.
“PHP-ize” the layout so that the same HTML “template” can be applied to all pages of the site.
develop some kind of back-end application to allow the client to manipulate site content.

The Present
That step 4 has always been a doosy for me. Every client is different and has different requirements. Unfortunately, it seemed that every project involved re-inventing the wheel to some degree. But basically, they all just want some sort of easy method to update and add content.

With a recent project, I decided to try something called Joomla, because the site itself was more or less news-centered and I thought it would be a good fit. I had tried phpNuke and phpBB in the past, but the template designs were so complex that I soon gave up. My first experience with Joomla was liberating. The template design was stupidly simple – just a single index.php file and a stylesheet. The site went up so fast, and porting content from their old site to the new “Joomla-enabled” site was so easy. I threw together a “Content Management and Administration” document for the client, and away they go.

The Future
So I start to think: what’s the drawback of this method of development? It seems like the CMS programs today have all of the flexibility to be able to deal with any kind of customization that might be required. All it takes is sometimes digging into the PHP code and making tweaks here or there. I suppose the overhead is a bit higher, as all of the content is stored in a database and response time is visibly slower at times and for some tasks (mileage may vary, depending on host). But the time and effort this saved me in designing the site, and the convenience of the client being able to make changes effortlessly more than makes up for it in my opinion.

Another benefit of this approach is that Step 3 virtually goes away as well. In the past I had to build back-end processors for building the pages and laying out the dynamic content, but all of that is included in the CMS. So the PHP-izing consists of simply plugging the CMS hooks into your template where you want the dynamic content to go. Piece of cake!

I think I’ve found my new best friend.

Discussion
If you use a CMS regularly, which one? What drawbacks to you see to this approach?