This week has been very hectic. I have had to set up 4 different servers for different sites. The first two were a hassle getting ffmpeg and ImageMagick installed and working on. The servers we are using come with RedHat EL4, which limits us in terms of package version available through yum. I ended up having to download a fair number of packages and building them from source. Once I finally had all of the dependencies worked out, everything went easy, but building from source has always been a pain.

Nursery Water Canada finally went live today. We were held up due to a large number of translation issues with the French site. They reside at nurserywater.ca and fr.nurserywater.ca. They went up without a hitch.

The biggest hassle this week has been transitioning one website to a new server. The site has 89 Gb of data, and transferring that over is taking a lot of time. Beyond that, the site was using legacy apache server side includes inside php files. I wasn’t able to get the new server to interpret the ssi’s in php files, so I ended up having to replace all of them with php include statements. In the long run, this is a better solution, but it just feels like time wasted.

I also have a Joomla project that is due next Friday that I was just able to start. I was supposed to have static templates at the beginning of the week, but my front-end developer, Daniel Andrews, kept getting pulled away by other projects.  I was able to prep a large portion of the content structure in Joomla though, so I was able to get the homepage content done in about 2 hours today. The difficult part of the project is just the VirtueMart store they want. I have to get VirtueMart and jSeblod to play nice with each other so that I can get the content I need for each product and display it the way we want. The design calls for details tabs that require specific layouts.

Overall, I’m somewhat disappointed with Joomla. The content organization is great, but the way their system outputs is horrifying. Everything is nested in tables needlessly. I find it odd that it is even the default output, since the joomla.org site doesn’t even use it. I’ve had to go in and hack most of the output pieces to remove all of the extraneous tables. For the most part, I just have it detect if I have set a certain body class, and if I have, just output the data using the jSeblod template provided. That works best in almost all cases.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at 11:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.