Been a bit quiet recently, mainly because been busy on developing 2 Joomla based sites for a client.
Both the sites require bespoke templates (so none of the off the shelf stuff).
The first for a health care company is nearing completion for stage 1, basically the template is with the client now for sign off and they are busy inputting and editing their content. A key requirement for this site was to make it accessible as close as possible to WCAG Level AA. After submitting the site for validation at the first pass it only failed on 1 thing really, which was fairly straight forward to resolve. This was to do with using the H elements in the correct hierarchical sequence, i.e. H1 should be followed by a H2, by a H3 etc. Joomla doesn’t quite do this out of the box and sometimes misses a level out, i.e. jumping from H1 to H3. So required further customisation to the template to correct this.
The site also needs to be secure, so there is no front end access to manage the content it’s all done via the back end control panel. Course it can be easily spotted that the site is Joomla or CMS driven, and therefore the URL for the control panel is well known. So a super strong password is required. However whilst looking into this found a neat plugin that adds another layer of security to the admin screens - it suffixes the admin URL with a secret key - get the key wrong and you’re presented with a 404 Page Not Found Error. Only when you get the URL with the secret key right are you presented with the Control Panel login. It’s called JSecure and requires Joomla 1.5. I’ll be using this on all my sites now going forward.
The second site, for a small business again posed a problem in that each page alternates between text on the left, picture on the right to picture on the left, text on the right. This was easily solved by simply managing the content correctly and setting the order of each article in the relevant category. It’s so important with the Content Managed systems to get the content sorted and organised first! I strive to get everything on the page as content and keep the template for controlling how the content is presented, rather than adding the difficult parts of the content into the template, which I see done quite a bit - defeats the object really. Again the general template for this is complete and with the client for initial testing.
I still have another Joomla based site waiting in the wings for development now as well!
PS. Whilst trying to dream up ultra hard passwords, I found a website that will generate them for you The BitMill - Random Password Generator. You can set how hard you want it to be, how long, what sort of characters are used etc. etc. No more racking the brains to dream up passwords!
