I put together a site in Joomla 1.5, http://www.gymspotter.com. Very cool stuff in Joomla 1.5. I have some commercial grade projects at work for Joomla that I'm really looking forward to. The code is much better architected, using MVC. One of my frustrations before was how tangled the display layer was with the code. I had to hack my last Joomla 1.0.x site quite a bit.

 

Plus the SEF stuff in 1.5 is much better. And it is much smarter about layout and module placing issues. Before, if you hit the content from the search function or the front page, you could get different layouts. Very frustrating if a piece of content has to have a certain banner. This has been fixed in 1.5.

Yeah, this isn't exactly the most current technology article ever written. Everyone is jumping over the new Openads 2.3 Beta and I'm writing about the 'soon-to-be-passé' Openads 2.0. Oh well, maybe someone needs a custom reporting plugin for Openads 2.0. If you do you're in luck.

I'm not one of those developers that specializes in vbulletin, but I do have a site that has a vbulletin install. It's not a major part of my job but every now and then I get requests that involve changing the templates or writing a small plugin.

I was asked to eliminate the Terms of Use page from the registration flow. Honestly, I'm not a fan of that page and IMHO it does represent a roadblock to higher registration rates. At this point I don't have numbers to back me up, but I haven't had one person that was new to vbulletin get to that page and not say 'Is this necessary?' In any case, I'm assuming that there are other people that want to take that out of the flow so I'm posting my steps.

It's been a while since I've posted. I've been working for PTOToday.com since February. On June 1st, we launched our first major consumer-facing site, www.back2school2007.com. The site was done completely in Joomla 1.0.12. I think the choice to go with a FOSS Content Management System was a great step and definitely helped figure out how to manipulate the front end and back end of Joomla. I'm looking forward to another project with Joomla, hopefully implementing 1.5.

 

Although I really like Joomla and many of its modules I was surprised how mixed up the display layer was with the programming. After working with .NET and reading so many articles, books etc about how necessary it is to maintain separate layers, it was disappointing to see how much I needed to hack files where the programming was completely entrenched with the HTML. I'm assuming much of this is taken care of in 1.5. 

OK, around day 70 in the life of the MacBook, the machine starts doing something that's been referred to as the "random shutoff". No sad mac, no blue screen of death, not even enough decency to hang an application — just turns off. It was happening infrequently around day 45, but it was always freeware video stuff so I chalked it up to software. But around day 70 it was happening no matter what. Open FireFox - blam. Taco HTML Editor - splat. Luckily almost all of my work is done remotely so I didn't really lose data and the only inconvenience was booting up. That said, you don't drop cash on a new laptop to have the worst hardware experience of your career.

I've been itching to get a laptop for some time now. Most of my work is done in a *nix environment so I was really set on getting a GNU/Linux laptop. I would probably have snagged one from LinuxCertified.com. Then I browsed Slashdot this morning and there was an article about the new MacBooks. They were right at the price point I was looking at and strangely enough had more RAM and hard disk space than the Linux models I was looking at. Maybe it's because Apple has gone the Intel route. I don't know but companies that sell Linux laptops are selling them at a premium it seems. I'd rather get some of the bells and whistles of the new MacBook and spend the same $$$. I started my career as an Apple addict and slowly I've come back since the introduction of OS X.