I used Joomla as the content management system to give the site it’s form and structure. The content was categorized and laid out in a way that would make it easy for the Webmaster to manage and maintain.

There was one area that was of paramount importance. The club needed an online calendar system where they could enter all of the various rides and activities to allow the site visitors to quickly see what was coming up.

Joomla does not have a calendar feature per se but through the use of extensions it offers the ability to augment core functionality with new features. I began searching for a calendaring module and finally settled on JCal Pro from Anything Digital.

This Joomla extension provides not only an online calendar but also modules to display the next few activities in a bulleted fashion. JCal Pro began as a non-commercial product but has since moved to being a full commercial implementation.

Anything Digital offers a subscription plan that allows you to download the latest version of JCal Pro for a specified time. I selected the Develop Special 1 bundle, which gave me access to JCal Pro version 1.5 as well as the newer JCal Pro version 2.

Besides download capabilities the subscription also allows you forum access to post questions and get product support. The Developer Special 1 bundle will grant you access not just to JCal Pro but also for Anything Digital’s application RSVP and Advanced Search.

I downloaded the software and installed it onto the Foothills HOG Joomla site. The installation was fairly simple and follows the standard implementation using the Joomla Administration module.

It did not take long to get the system up and running but there are some caveats to be considered. Joomla does not recognize the concept of daylight saving time so twice a year the JCal Pro gets a little confused. This usually means having to go in and manually adjusting the dates or times to get things on the right track.

JCal Pro manages time itself and Joomla does likewise. Trying to get your hands around how each interact is a logic puzzle that can at times be frustrating. The JCal Pro development is fairly active meaning there have been several upgrades during the first year of implementation.

It has been a little frustrating because the bugs that I have encountered in the application seem to come and go with each successive implementation. There are also some features that are missing that you would just expect to be there. Printing a calendar resulted in a creative hack uncovered through the forums otherwise that was not included in the base package.

The types of data that can be displayed is also incomplete making it confusing to the inexperienced administrator. With each successive upgrade there have been issues regarding the existing data. In some instances it has required re-inputting the data, a very tedious process.

Many of the bug fixes and changes show up in later releases but as beta versions requiring the Joomla Administrator to run beta extensions on a production server. This is ripe for problems and has come into play in more than one occasion.

Despite all of the trials and tribulations JCal Pro has performed adequately. Of all the calendar extensions currently available, it seems to be the most feature-rich and stable. I’m continuing to use it but cringe every time I have to make changes to it since you never know what will break next.

I’d love to give this extension a raving review but given its track record I hesitate recommending this to all Joomla administrators. If you need a calendar system and you don’t mind a little extra work JCal Pro could be just what you’re looking for.

As a child I remember the neighborhood was a community. Your family interacted with other families living around them. Yards rarely had fences and everyone congregated in front of their houses. When they saw neighbors out they went out of their way to greet them and engage in conversation.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve noticed that neighborhoods and communities have changed. Now there are gated communities where people are locked behind enclosed fortresses. Everyone has a walled fence around their property and few people venture outside of their home or converse with anyone outside of their family.

Perhaps this is a function of growth and change or perhaps it is indicative of the fear people are developing about the horrors of society. No matter the reasons, people have become closed off from others.

Humans are by nature social creatures and this isolation is difficult for many to manage. With the proliferation of the Internet and immediate communication channels, communities have emerged in the digital world. People feel safe hiding behind a keyboard and screen knowing that if they are rejected there are thousands of others who will accept them.

These social media communities are similar to those created on this continent during the expansion westward in the early days of this country. Rather than travelling by wagon train or horse, the adventurers are arriving via the browser.

If the traveler feels comfortable, they may stay in the community building it up adding another resident. Many though are just passing through trying to find a place to settle where they feel comfortable. In this case the traveler may create an account in a community then wander away to continue searching for the right place.

In some cases like myself, I am more of a mountain man. I may be gone for an extended period of time then return to one settlement or another trading my wares with the local citizens then disappearing again into the wilderness.

From this perspective it sometimes becomes hard for a community to find you since you come and go with the seasons. What is needed is a mailbox or some way for the other settlers to know who this mysterious man is that wanders into their community.

For that reason I created a Social Media Hub. This is a type of address book where settlers can go to find out what my address in the various Social Media communities. The hub resides on my personal web site and graphically displays each of the social communities where I belong.

This is a Joomla module that I wrote. In the administration tool the Social Media Hub module will track your social media profile for 56 different social media web sites. For each of these you can enter your user name and it will direct site visitors to the appropriate profile page on each service.

So far it has worked quite well. I have set it to be able to adjust the icon size and icon type. Through testing on the 26 different social media sites I personally have accounts for it seems to be working as designed.

Now when someone wants to find me on a specific social media site all they have to do is visit my web page and click on the appropriate icon and it will redirect them to my profile allowing them to send me a message. The next time I wander out of the wilderness and visit that social media community I will have a message.

I have also become a big fan of Twitter as a communication tool. Within its 140-character limit you are able to share all kinds of information and reach people you may not otherwise be in contact with.

Through using Twitter I have made several friends and contacts. Many of these contacts want to be notified whenever content changes on my web site. Out of the box, Joomla does not offer the ability to broadcast site changes to Twitter.

Like many other features though, the development community has come to the aid of web site owners and have developed Joomla extensions that will incorporate this new functionality. A quick search of the Joomla Extension Library showed that there are several modules capable of integrating with Joomla.

I think I tried each of the modules attempting to find a good balance of functionality with minimal interaction by the web site owner. After all, what good is a solution if it requires you to spend more time managing the tool than the benefit you derive from it?

Initially I used an extension called Twitter Status. It would allow me to post a Twitter message each time I published a new article. It did not allow posting of updates and was relatively basic in its functionality. The developer first introduced Twitter Status as a free extension but then decided to make it commercial leaving early adopters hanging unless they paid.

From my research I could not determine whether the newer version would allow any additional functionality and I was unwilling to purchase the extension without knowing whether it would meet my needs. I attempted to contact the developer but his response was basically that I was not a paid customer and therefore he had little or no time to answer my inquiries.

Based upon his responses I decided I needed to look for another solution. After installing and testing several Twitter extensions I settled on Auto Tweet written by Ulli Storck.

Auto Tweet acts as a Joomla plug-in installing through the Joomla Administration module. Once installed the plug-in is quickly configured. Besides securely storing your user name and password, the configuration page also allows you to decide whether you want the page URL appended to your Twitter message and how many attempts the plug-in should make if it is unsuccessful in posting.

You can define specific sections and categories that will be tweeted and you can exclude sections and categories. You can post just new articles or modified or private articles. You can also include static text and hash tags to your messages to make sure the tweet reaches the appropriate audience.

Overall Auto Tweet has worked flawlessly and I have received several comments from friends thanking me for keeping them informed of changes to my web site. It is one of those set it and forget it kind of extensions that make managing a web site easier while driving traffic to your pages.

I wanted this to give the visitor an idea of what they may have missed from the first dozen years of games played by the team. The issue I had was I needed a software application that would be graphics intensive yet allow for other content on subsequent pages.

The back-end of Now Hitting is the Joomla content management system. I chose this because of its power and ease of use. I also liked the idea that I could extend the product with new features as I deemed necessary.

It was this extensibility that was most important especially for the multimedia aspects I was planning for the home page. I perused the Joomla extension library, which has thousands of modules that can be installed to add specific functionality to a web site.

I tried several slideshow alternatives and always seemed to come away disappointed. They were either extremely slow or not robust enough to allow them to be used on a site that receives regular visitors during the baseball season.

I was about to give up and try something new when I came across an application that did exactly what I was looking for. SlideShowPro by Domney Design Inc is a Flash-based plug-in that will produce a slideshow for web-based sites.

It allows not only a rotating photo display but will also enable the use of video should I decide to expand the pictures to a more robust media type. Setting up the software was fairly straightforward.

In my case I purchased two different products. I ordered SlideShowPro for flash that allows the slideshows to be displayed using Adobe Flash. The second piece of software was the companion SlideShowPro Director that allows the slideshows to be created without having a full Flash development system.

In order to integrate SlideShowPro with Joomla I added the Joomla module EasySSP. This module provides a seamless integration of the SlideShowPro slideshows with Joomla. Once installed and configured it simply became a matter of defining the size of the slideshow component and pointing to the parameters file.

Within just a few short hours I went from a text based home page to an immersive experience that pictorially showed the progression of the Arizona Diamondbacks from expansion team to today.

I cannot recommend enough the SlideShowPro and EasySSP applications. It should be noted that SlideShowPro is licensed on a per domain basis so if you are like me and have multiple domains you will need a separate license for each one. After the success I have had with SlideShowPro I am now considering ways that will allow me to add this functionality to my other web sites.

I’m not here to talk about light bulbs though. That is just one example. I could go through countless others such as song lyrics or album art for the music in my iTunes library or having to have all socks matched up. I seriously cannot deal with the idea of one of my socks being lost and unable to be with its mate in the sock drawer. I have found a new area to focus my insanity, code validation services.
I am not exactly sure who decided it was important to have perfectly formed (X)HTML code or who deemed it important that a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) conform to a specific format. I am not even sure I know what would happen if you chose not to conform to these. I mean Microsoft has been non-standard for years with their Internet Explorer browser and Netscape long ago decided it would be better to define their own standards rather than conform to those of the W3C. Why then should I care if the code on my site gets the green checkmark that lets the world know that the code is accurate? Until I found the code validator my life was carefree and the code didn’t seem to matter. Since I found the code validator I have been consumed with the notion that all code no matter what the browser must be completely error free. It’s no longer just a nice to have, it is a requirement of extreme magnitude.
I recently installed Joomla! 1.5.3 on a test server to begin evaluating it to determine what I will need to do to deploy this technology into production. Since this was a test system I naturally installed the test data so I had some content available when I began testing the system. As I typically do, I absent mindedly clicked the validation button and was taken to the code validator. I was shocked to find that the system gave multiple errors. This was a fresh installation of Joomla! 1.5.3 with no modification and it was giving me errors. I dropped everything I was doing and began devoting WAY too much time to try and figure out what was going on. This led to several days and a multitude of messages back and forth on the Joomla! forums as I explained the situation. I narrowed down the issue to one where the system was not properly forming links that included the ampersand “&” within the URL. I went back and forth trying to understand what it was within Joomla! 1.5.3 that was causing this problem. Things were further complicated when others noted that they were not getting the same problem on clean installs on their server.
This was beginning to look like a server configuration issue. I went through the Joomla! documentation checking my server configuration against what was listed as minimum requirements. My system met all of the criteria but still something was amiss. After several tests and a lot of research I narrowed it down to the version of PHP that was loaded on the server. My ISP was using PHP version 4.3.7 which was within the guidelines specified as minimum requirements. Other servers I had were using PHP version 5.2 and I wondered if something was different. I moved my test site to a system that was running PHP version 5.2.3 and ran the exact same configuration through the validation service. This time it came out perfectly clean. So five days later I am back to square one but at least now I am starting with what I know to be clean code. Not even a light bulb has caused me this much trouble.

Knowing my personality I was confident that I would not find a template that would match the artistic vision I had for Now Hitting. I am eclectic in my style and very specific in my vision. Rather than looking for a template I could use, I started looking at each template to see what pieces I could gather to create my own template. I went in looking for a set of templates, what I came out with was something substantially more profound from my perspective.
One of the templates that I found particularly interesting was the Five Point/Unity template from Toolbox Creations. I am somewhat partial to the darker templates as they make the graphics stand out more. The Five Point/Unity template was very well written and has a lot of features that I love. There were of course some things that I wanted to change such as column width and a few other things. I ended up tearing into the template files and making changes for another project that I am on the hook for. As I began looking under the covers of this template I found something that completely floored me. The header on the site I naturally assumed was a graphic since it contained a font face I had never seen before. Looking closer at it though I realized that I could highlight the font as though it were text! I have long lamented at the fact that web designers are at the mercy of the end user when it comes to look and feel for their sites. If a user refuses to allow JavaScript or if they do not have a font installed within their system, the web designer cannot possibly guarantee what the page would look like. In a print world that would be equivalent to requiring each reader to own the typeface of the magazine. If they didn’t have that font then the layout of the magazine would change to reflect the type that they did have. What a disaster. Here though was a template that was using a font that was non-existent in my system yet was displaying correctly regardless of what computer I was on. This was something I definitely had to know more about.
I began reviewing the configuration files and ran across an acronym I was unfamiliar with; sIFR. sIFR is a typography method for the web which will allow the embedding of font technology onto the page using a form of Flash. sIFR is short for Scalable Inman Flash Replacement. A full description of this process can be found on Mike Davidson’s blog. I wholeheartedly recommend reading through the specification that Mike and Mark Wubben developed. I would also recommend reading through Mike’s blog as it has some great information. I always love it when I end up travelling down a path on the Internet and find a pot of gold waiting at the end of my journey. With sIFR I will be able to ensure that the font style that I intended is actually what is seen. There are of course some caveats to using sIFR. First, it does require JavaScript and Flash so if your users do not have these pre-requisites then the user experience is not going to be quite as seamless. In that case sIFR will resort to using the styles described in the CSS for the page. That’s not too bad since CSS is what you would be confined to anyway so I look at sIFR as an unexpected bonus. The other issue is that sIFR doesn’t really work on a local development box (or at least on mine) so you may have to change your development and testing procedures to be able to test it fully.
The Five Point/Unity template uses sIFR fonts for its header. The template requires the same font to be used for both the site name and the site description. I have modified the code to allow for different fonts for each of those two fields. I also found a great repository for sIFR pre-defined fonts at FontSmack. sIFR fonts are flash descriptions of the typeface itself so you do need resources to create a font face to be used on the web. Fontsmack has a lot of typefaces so that will help if you don’t have the tools installed on your system to create your own custom fonts. I’ve just begun playing with this technology even though it has been defined for a couple of years. I plan to implement it on a few of my sites over time and I’ll let you know if I run into any issues with the technology.