A Blog on Joomla, Zen Cart, Web design, CMS and Open Source software by and for professionals and their clients. http://www.conticreative.com Thu, 28 Aug 2008 10:25:44 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://www.conticreative.com/images/M_images/rss20.gif http://www.conticreative.com A Blog on Joomla, Zen Cart, Web design, CMS and Open Source software by and for professionals and their clients. http://www.conticreative.com/blog--articles/joomla-zen-cart-and-open-source/un-joomla-your-joomla-site.html One of the tricks to make your finished site as professional as it can be is to eliminate the various references Joomla makes to itself throughout the site. If your site is at risk of being hacked, the following tricks will help mask your site from the various script kiddies and any ill intentioned hacker. Warning: you are not actually locking down your site or make it hack proof completely. The intention here is simply to make it so that at first glance it will be hard to recognize your site as being built using Joomla.     Blog & Articles - Joomla Zen Cart and Open Source Thu, 01 Mar 2007 19:14:27 +0100 http://www.conticreative.com/blog--articles/joomla-zen-cart-and-open-source/how-to-make-a-static-home-page-in-joomla.html Joomla is a fantastic tool for building modern and dynamic websites. However, many people new to Joomla find it hard to set up their site to mimic a non-portal site with one or more fixed articles on the front or main home page. In this article I will try to explain some of the tricks you can use to achieve this effect while keeping the RSS feed and the blog style layout of the dynamic content. In Joomla the Home page is not just a regular page. In fact, the Frontpage , as it is called, is nothing more than a Joomla component in its own right. In a regular Joomla site the Frontpage allows the user to publish selected articles in a blog or portal style. While this is a nice feature and one of the things that make Joomla so powerful, many websites need a Home page with a fixed article to greet and guide visitors or illustrate the site purpose. While this is actually easy to achieve, it is not immediately evident. I will assume you know your way around Joomla! by now, but even if you don't these techniques should be fairly easy to follow. Blog & Articles - Joomla Zen Cart and Open Source Sun, 04 Feb 2007 12:02:36 +0100 http://www.conticreative.com/blog--articles/the-business-of-web-design/hyper-real-postmodenism.html Don’t let the headline fool you. This is no historical reference diatribe. This is just my humble observations and predictions of the general design trends for 2007. Less to try and nail down specific trends, but more to open a dialog between artists and those who might be interested in the global state of design for 2007. Blog & Articles - The business of web design Wed, 20 Dec 2006 09:56:17 +0100 http://www.conticreative.com/blog--articles/joomla-zen-cart-and-open-source/set-up-a-blog-in-joomla.html A common complaint of the Joomla! Blog section is that it seems to have a life of its own. Joomla! is based on the concept of Sections and Categories , where a Section is composed of one or more categories and each category is composed of the actual content. This is a source of some confusion and a lot of frustration on the part of users and I will try to explain how the Joomla! system works and how to set up a working personal bog in Joomla! Blog & Articles - Joomla Zen Cart and Open Source Fri, 15 Dec 2006 14:53:53 +0100 http://www.conticreative.com/blog--articles/joomla-zen-cart-and-open-source/designing-css-layouts-for-joomla-with-dreamweaver.html Many web designers are used to and like to use Macromedia Dreamweaver (DW) to work on their HTML and CSS. The latter in particular is very well supported in DW8 and it allows for very visual work on CSS files. However, because of the way Joomla templates are structured it is often impossible, or at least unpractical, to work on a Joomla template from within DW in any satisfactory fashion. I think I might have found a workable solution that with some adjustment allows a designer to customize a Joomla template in fine detail. Blog & Articles - Joomla Zen Cart and Open Source Fri, 03 Nov 2006 15:35:37 +0100 http://www.conticreative.com/blog--articles/joomla-zen-cart-and-open-source/how-to-edit-a-joomla-template-with-firefox.html When I first discovered Joomla! when it was still Mambo, my first question was: How the heck am I going to edit the template? I think this is pretty much the first question any traditional web designer has when they first try to work with a CMS. It's natural. We are used to a Top down style of designing the page and then inserting the content, Joomla is the opposite. The content is there, but the design, even the excellently designed Ruck Solarflare, is the first thing we must change if we want to make an original website.  I came up with two distinctive systems for dealing with Joomla templates, one uses the excellent Firefox Web Developer plug in and the other is a more traditional approach using Macromedia Dreamweaver as a css editor. Both assume that the web designer reading this article is interested in having some sort of visual feedback when editing CSS files. This article is about using Firefox and how it can be edit many aspects of a Joomla template. Using the Firefox Web Developer extension is, to me, a bit more laborious and confusing than using Dreamweaver, but it is more immediate and less convoluted at times. Let's get going. Blog & Articles - Joomla Zen Cart and Open Source Sun, 29 Oct 2006 21:36:48 +0100 http://www.conticreative.com/blog--articles/joomla-zen-cart-and-open-source/joomla-fatal-error-allowed-memory-size.html Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 184320 bytes) (NOTE: The above is not an actual error - just a subtitle, don't be alarmed) Working with Joomla! is very exhilarating and there is a tendency, when you work on your site, to want to test all the different modules available. Some of them have some really crappy code, others are simply not compatible with one of the other modules. Inevitably, problems will arise. I had almost finished building my site, when it crashed big time. At that point I decided to install it again from scratch making sure to document and back up every step of the way, a practice I follow religiously when I work for a client but that I sometime ignore when working on my own site. Big mistake. Everything was going fine until i installed Community Builder (http://www.joomlapolis.com/), a great app for building communities with Joomla, and I linked it with Joomlaboard, a light weight forum that is actually quite useful and even powerful if not the prettiest out there. I tested the site and it worked fine until I went for dinner. At my return, trying to view my profile as a user in the front end gave me this error message: Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 184320 bytes) /-/-/-/-/mod_filename.php The rest of the page was a blank. I did a quick search in the various forum, starting with joomlopolis, the makers of the Community Builder script for Joomla. Blog & Articles - Joomla Zen Cart and Open Source Sat, 28 Oct 2006 15:47:33 +0100 http://www.conticreative.com/blog--articles/joomla-zen-cart-and-open-source/zen-cart-and-the-art-of-image-handling.html Welcome to my first Zen Cart (http://www.zencart.com/) article. In this post I'll try to explain how to manage images in Zen cart and a few tricks I have learned along the way. By default, Zen Cart displays images in 3 sizes: small thumbnails for the product listing pages, medium for the Product Info page and large, used when the user clicks on the View Image link in the product description. When the user uploads a picture to Zen Cart in the administration interface Zen Cart processes that image when a given page is displayed (Scaling it to the appropriate size for the different views). Blog & Articles - Joomla Zen Cart and Open Source Tue, 24 Oct 2006 20:25:45 +0100