Category: Technical

Recently I've discovered what caused the amount of visitors to a certain website to drop sharply and for an extended amount of time. I'd noticed myself that the site had started to run slower recently and was loading unpredictably, which are normally bad signs on itself. Then people started to report (amongst other strange … Read more

Last weekend I gave a presentation at PFCongres 2011 about the efficient use of CSS. When I was talking about floating elements that can be cleared with clear & clearfix classes, someone in the audience pointed out the clearing technique 'overflow:hidden'. I had to admit that I had never heard of this technique before and … Read more

A little under a year ago I wrote a blog post on how to 'Retrieve Plugin, Module, Component and Template Parameters in Joomla! 1.5'. At this moment, that blog is in our top 10 of most read blogs! Given this popularity and the number of comments that short blog received, it made sense to write a new version with information on … Read more

Almost every website is styled using CSS these days. This includes using (sometimes very cumbersome) techniques, while in the same situations it would've been possible to use clean code. In this series of blogs several (unknown) techniques and best practices will be discussed. Styling your website using CSS will be as simple … Read more

The usage of a Virtual Private Server (VPS) is getting more popular every day. The price of a VPS is relatively low these days and the freedom of configuration and access to the server is a real blast. There are some things to keep in mind though. Photo credits: Jamison_Judd What is a VPS? A VPS (Virtual Private Server) is … Read more

Update: Joomla! 1.7 version of this blog post is now available! Check it out: here. Since the release of Joomla 1.5, developers can enable users to configure extensions using parameters. While the possibility of being able to do this is great, it is often a chore to keep track of the code needed to access one of these … Read more

Last week I've spent countless hours debugging a problem with a piece of Javascript code. The solution was ridiculously simple, but to my big surprise I couldn't find any sources on the internet documenting it: load your CSS files before your JS files. Let's discuss some details. Photo credits: Kaiban It looks … Read more

Back in the old days of PHP (including business logic), and HTML were often mixed in source files. The opening and closing tag of PHP made this intermixing of code and markup possible. These days this mixing is far less common and even more open source projects are dropping the PHP closing tag. See the (awful) code below … Read more

Rather than writing an extensive post detailing all the steps needed to enable the FTP layer in Joomla, I will give a brief overview of common problems that are encountered in this process. Much of the tips will be taken from other authors (of course with credits where due). Photo credits: fuzzcaminski A short … Read more

When developing or maintaining a Joomla website or Joomla template it is important to know when PHP is generating errors. If an error occurs, clearly something went wrong and you want to know about this so you can fix the problem. Photo credits: Nick J Webb Displaying errors When you are developing on your own computer the … Read more