Disqus - Latest Comments for absalom

Re: We’re Hiring a Joomla Web Developer

Lawrence Meckan — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 10:54:19 -0000

Ever considered remoting for this role as collaborating on work would be a bonus with the mindshare?

Re: The fallacy of validation | thinksync

Lawrence Meckan — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 13:12:28 -0000

I still feel you're muddying validation as equivalent to web accessibility, when validation is just one step of many within the practice of web accessible industry best practice design. In light of SOCOG vs Macguire and the decade of web accessible practice since then, people are still seeing the issue still stuck at validation, leading to a mentality that well formed, valid code shouldn't be created as it is typecast to be without SEO benefit. After all, you created this post on it.

These days Joomla plugins, both from the core (Mootools, anyone?) and from third party developers, are loaded up with AJAX, and I'm still finding plugins that deny basic HTML guidelines like alt tags and semantic structure. Sure, they may place elements inside divisions but they generally don't understand what that means for content flow and readability. There is little to no progressive enhancement of Javascript involved, let alone graceful degradation, both of which remain two design strategies that can help implement web accessible Javascript code. Most open source and commercial works I've had to deal with seem to run under the assumption that everyone needs the Javascript functionality as is to negotiate correctly. And the sad thing is, the correct usage of Javascript is just another step of many after basic mechanical validation for a site to be web accessible. There's even more steps after these basic programming principles are applied that need to be considered such as the use of colours, layout, font-size, contrast, information management; use of language inside copy and structures.

There is no simple solution that can be achieved programatically to refactor all the core and third party work that remains Javascript dependent and web inaccessible. Neither can there be a single all in one solution outside the core itself that makes every component, plugin and template play nice to the level it can pass muster with web accessibility and usability. So you can't just have a plugin that refactors tables into other forms of data, layout and copy. Why ? Because it needs to be intelligent enough to understand what is actually inside that table and parse it accordingly.

The annoying thing I find is that most developers out there borrow extensively from the core or template overrides in designing their work, and as such, repeat the same mistakes as them. It's how most of the premium template shops keep on getting their client sites hacked as the overrides provide a vector because they may be based on old or insecure code. The same would be said regarding the high visibility of Joomla third party attack vectors on places like Metasploit.

The solution, from a business and design perspective, is to tighten the core structures down whilst providing a web accessible framework for all areas of the CMS package. Otherwise how else will the current third party developers learn from their mistakes? They need to be led by example no less. But such a strategy would be a fundamental rethink of what Joomla stands for and how it is designed and coded.

Re: The fallacy of validation | thinksync

Lawrence Meckan — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 07:46:00 -0000

No, it's not heretical. It's indeed possible. The problem is in how you and other people are training the next generation of designer/developers in their art through posts such as this one. You have to shift focus off validation and onto web accessibility, which generally remains a whole separate science and artform that 90% of the web community do not focus on. It's why I commented on the limitations of the mechanical validation, something you see as repeating your point.

And since they don't focus on web accessibility for their customers, they just aim for the smallest common denominator which is a mechanical pass on W3C with an upsell to the customer as some magical SEO benefit, even within the Joomla community. I do believe Rockettheme, one of the original subscription clubs within the Joomla sphere, traded on this very mantra marketing their templates as being web accessible, yet the reality was that they were filled with AJAX and other malformed junk.

Other statements like "However It's not reasonable to assume that simply because a site doesn't validate that the structure can't support good SEO practice or that it's inherently bad for SEO. The code may be perfectly fine for SEO or it could be a disaster area: validation can't tell you that." is a misnomer and actively encourages designers and developers to write bad code and two finger any web accessibility whatsoever.

Which leads to the very problem you did not want to fight: "As you no doubt know Lawrence, many Joomla extensions have an extremely poorly written presentation layer - if I wanted to ensure my Joomla sites all passed validation, I'd be opening myself up for a world of hurt." It may be a world of hurt, but it reflects how badly coded and designed these applications are.

Your Australian clientele should meet the same levels of understanding of web accessibility as seen in SOCOG Vs Macguire, yet they don't thanks to Joomla and the smorgasbord of poorly designed applications, so something has to give.

Re: The fallacy of validation | thinksync

Lawrence Meckan — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 00:49:15 -0000

Then you're missing the point of validation. W3C validation is the first step of many in providing a semantic, web accessible website. There are many more steps after it. That is why your claim that the failure points remain arbitrary and unrelated to the ability of users is a cacadoxy. Both mechanical and human web accessibility testing regimes apply to the ability of users and search engines to see your sites. GWT isn't enough in the same way that passing a mechanical test isn't enough.

Furthermore, as both of our businesses remain Australian based, the ruling of SOCOG vs Macguire does provide keen insight and direction on what structures and practices we should be building for our customers. And remember, most of the Joomla extensions out there are GPL, so you have the option to submit patches back to the original developer or even fork (with an associated commercial revenue stream, if you so wish) in order to provide web accessible refactoring of their work.

There is also a discernible difference thanks to the Google search engine, along with other meta / content aggregation engines recognising Rich Snippets which is based on microdata / microformats, being well formed, industry best practice semantic code. But a mechanical pass of W3C won't provide a full picture of semantic source ordered content. At best it can tell if the heading structures are set out logically, and even then that's an extra option you have to turn on independently inside the validator engine.

Offering to clients and customers that their sites simply have to pass eyeball browser tests and GWT is pretty much ignoring the last decade of web accessible advancement and training since SOCOG vs Macguire. I find that saddening to say the least.

Re: The fallacy of validation | thinksync

Lawrence Meckan — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 06:36:48 -0000

The fallacy is not validation. The fallacy is agencies and developers who think a dry run mechanical validation with a pass mark off the W3C site is all that's needed to make a site accessible and human readable, in order to increase search engine awareness of that content.

So you're left with an ignorant customer who is upsold on W3C mechanical validation as a sign of competence in SEO, when the reality is far different. A mechanical pass on W3C is just a mechanical pass, it is not a sign of well formed semantic layout, let alone human and machine readable content. Well formed, semantic, industry best practice design principles deployed as a human readable and accessible site do provide SEO benefits, least of which is basic content negotiation, something usually locked out by stock standard Flash site or AJAX functionality.

So the irony here is that it is not validation that provides SEO benefits, but industry best practice design that correctly negotiates to provide web accessible content both to users and to search engines. Which does seem to annul your entire pitch.

Up and coming designers and developers do need to be taught what is industry best practice, and by pitching that validation is a fallacy for SEO, you may end up endengering the idea that web accessible sites should not be created.

Re: Mambo 4.5.3 Review :: Absalom Media :: CSS design and accessible CMS support

Lawrence Meckan — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 09:20:10 -0000

Mambo and Joomla backend templates have always been incompatible. It requires structural changes to the database in order for the backend to work correctly.

Re: Official Support :: Absalom Media :: CSS design and accessible CMS support

Lawrence Meckan — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 09:15:39 -0000

Please purchase a support subscription for Joomla in order to facilitate the upgrade process. Kind regards

Re: Stand up, Speak out! | Joomla GPS - brian.teeman.net

Lawrence Meckan — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 18:07:12 -0000

Brian, how is documented analysis and reporting that gets rejected an excuse?

Prior to 1.5 being released I did ongoing analysis as to why 1.5 would not meet it's own marketing claims of being accessible, and as such, exposing the project to potential litigation for false and misleading claims. This was in addition to other enterprise level work I offered up to the project.

In the last 6 months I've done more work regarding user experience, microformats and accessibility across the 1.5 to 1.6 trunks. Again this analysis has been rejected out of hand, even when there is hard, impartial user experience testing and an open methodology for analysis so people can comment and understand the outcome.

Both Torkil and yourself talk of a way to speak. If impartial business analysis that aims to increase the user experience and the accessibility of the product is rejected when it is framed in a report that covers the necessary technical and business measures, that means there is another reason the development staff refuse to engage such ideas. Occam's razor would suggest that the perception by the dev staff of what they feel is a negative review.

At the end of the day businesses reject the analysis of consultants and third parties for two reasons. Budget and emotional investment. Since budget isn't a factor in OSS development, the emotional investment of the staff is the crux.

Create a safe place where anyone, not just dev staff or OSM, have an emotional investment in the product, and can develop their ideas freely without fear of retribution or blacklisting and then you have the means necessary to speak out and speak up freely.

Re: Stand up, Speak out! | Joomla GPS - brian.teeman.net

Lawrence Meckan — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 08:26:01 -0000

No use speaking up if all it does is make the powers that be so much more antagonistic towards any dissenting voice.

Considering there seems to be a mentality that people involved in the project have to be paid to be motivated, it's more than ironic that whenever I've produced work for the project, it has been rejected out of hand on the caveat it must be delivered under "their" rules, otherwise it's not welcome. User experience modelling and testing really isn't that helpful it seems when the development team cares about is code, not design or architecture.

I've spoken up, both sides of my supposedly blacklisting from this community, and delivered work to it, and in all cases, it is someone else who has failed to acknowledge what aspects of work are actually valuable to the project.

Re: Inspired, copied or plain stolen... | Mister Men - brian.teeman.net

Lawrence Meckan — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 20:05:54 -0000

Welcome to the underbelly of the Joomla world.

Not the first time this has happened, even at an official level. When people are being trained at Joomla Days to rip and repackage other people's creative copyrighted works (note, there is no clear delineation on a GPL licence violation in this case), it's not half obvious that things are not sunshine and roses within the Joomla community.

The problem is that the horse has well and truly bolted in terms of copyright protection, since there has been a history of copyright infringement for a while. This problem is pervasive across the Joomla industry / bazaar / marketplace, and nothing is done about it.

And you wonder why people encrypt and provide dial-home devices? To stop this sort of copyright infringement occurring. But hey, the JED and OSM only allow GPL works.. and it still happens...

The irony here is deafening.

Re: Joomla warez and downloads | Extensions - brian.teeman.net

Lawrence Meckan — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 07:11:55 -0000

"Pirating" a GPL work is a misnomer in the instance of warez. At best, you could have code contamination with a non-GPL compatible licence for code, which is licence and copyright infringement. This differentiation made is within Joomla itself. Ideology leads to action, after all.

I see no reason to differentiate. Even with the support packages we onsell for software.

Re: Rapid iphone development - no code required | Web Development - brian.teeman.net

Lawrence Meckan — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 09:40:29 -0000

Welcome to the dark side, Brian. We make good cookies ;)

Re: Joomla warez and downloads | Extensions - brian.teeman.net

Lawrence Meckan — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 01:54:55 -0000

Really, at the end of the day, warez and the rest of microstock "club" piracy comes down to business decisions within the industry.

Let's look at the industry then.

Fact 1: Microstock industries have higher piracy rates (e.g. template subscription "clubs", stock art, crowdsourcing design) than businesses that provide customer focussed full service solutions. Can't really pirate someone's service or skillset to a customer.

Fact 2: Some Joomla Days have actively encouraged piracy by suggesting to people as part of training to "rip" existing sites they like and then submit them to a client for a minimum $5k figure (Got the documents to prove it, too!)

Fact 3: Joomla, through it's own ideology, promotes GPL as being "more secure" than commercial works, and generally gives a fairly negative rep to commercial (i.e. non-GPL) Joomla providers who get pirated. Think it's Section 4 of the Joomla Security Checklist. The whole point of commercial, non-GPL work being "less valuable" to the Joomla community can likewise being intepreted that it's okay to pirate, torrent and warez. After all, if Joomla doesn't value non-GPL piracy of works that interact with Joomla (and has stated such), why should anyone else?

Once you consider this sort of behaviour from a business perspective, it's not that hard to see how it's come about.

Re: Joomla Developers Showdown - The Winner | Joomla GPS - brian.teeman.net

Lawrence Meckan — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 05:41:17 -0000

Well, they did it with FullCodePress.. and that's been the antipodean showdown that's got an established history.

http://www.fullcodepress.co...

Applying a Mechanical Turk perspective to the team that won would explain, from a business perspective, why it won. Otherwise, it's not a fair fight.

Re: Joomla Developers Showdown - The Winner | Joomla GPS - brian.teeman.net

Lawrence Meckan — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:12:57 -0000

Congratulations on the BEER team with Nooku.

One thing I'm still a little unsure about. Most showdowns have equal team members (e.g. FullCodePress) with predefined staff roles and allocated timeframes. As far as I can make out, the BEER team had 3 with a testing pool of 4, sum total 7... in comparison to the team members of EasyCompany.. which remain unlisted. Why?

Equal teams, equal goal would be an effective showdown that can be measured with metrics.

Re: Joomla Suppporters Club | Joomla GPS - brian.teeman.net

Lawrence Meckan — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 01:53:44 -0000

Brian, somewhere wires got crossed. I mentioned about PL's badge system for Mambo. Little confused as to how this equates to "put the past behind you and move on" ?

Re: Automatic Joomla updates | Joomla GPS - brian.teeman.net

Lawrence Meckan — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 01:38:46 -0000

Hit this issue so often it's not funny whilst consulting/contracting for other businesses.

And no, it's not pretty to fix, especially when dealing with fragmented custom templates.

The overrides change PHP behaviours which, in reality, should not be part of a template. Templates should stick to artwork, CSS and HTML (maybe a little JS), not behavioural changes inside PHP.

Studios and template farms use the overrides system to churn out templates quickly, without testing the quality and security of their own code in comparison to the security updates. And then get their clients breached because of it. I've had to clean up such messes.

Whilst overrides seem to be a good shortcut feature to better functionality, we are left with designers (who generally have little to no security knowledge about Joomla) hacking override templates to pieces, exposing new security holes.

The multiplication of work and effort in order to patch and secure everything due to the overrides also presents a quandary.

If it's creating more work at the expense of security, is the override system an overall positive or negative at the end of the day?

Re: Joomla Suppporters Club | Joomla GPS - brian.teeman.net

Lawrence Meckan — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 05:59:38 -0000

It seems an echo of history, but wasn't Peter Lamont attempting to do something similar with the Mambo Badge thingamajig during the first Foundation / fork to Joomla ?

Badges for relevance and visibility, not exactly levels, but there were rumours benefits were being given (both ways, to the Foundation and to those who advocated it).

Re: What is the future for joomla? | Joomla GPS - brian.teeman.net

Lawrence Meckan — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:00:19 -0000

The only reason it continues to rate in competition for open source CMS prizes is the size of the mob. Flash mobbing a competition in order to say how good a product is (especially when those choices come down to radio buttons/list boxes, not qualitative analysis and judgment) belies the nature of the problem.

Joomla's community has massive numbers. Those numbers create major momentum for evangelism, and unfortunately, if we want to be honest with ourselves, a massive capacity for failure. That one thing I see Brian noting is that the momentum is not directed towards a clear, concise product spec. This is the future of Joomla. Who creates and controls the spec is the million dollar question.

Re: What is the future for joomla? | Joomla GPS - brian.teeman.net

Lawrence Meckan — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 08:31:10 -0000

Jen, thank you for your frankness regarding the breakdown in communication channels.

These are the issues identified, as I see them:

A lack of a strong benevolent leader figure means the various teams do their own little thing, come together once in a while (or when the Core Team says "jump"), leading to divergent ideas and direction / lack of motivation.

A lack of a strong leader means that Joomla ends up being a generic solution, aiming to meet every need possible, as there is no clear business case management as to what goes and what stays and/or design, usability, functionality, etc.. No clear niche or market it's aiming at. There's hints now and then that it's tilting at the enterprise market, but it never seems to reach it.

A lack of a strong development plan means people remain unable to contribute effectively as people don't know what's needed and what's not, and giving free and open channels to contribute. It wouldn't be too much of a leap to suggest that the current methodology regarding the teams is failing, since there is no clarity on development processes, bug reports, QA, UX, IA, accessibility, semantics or functionality direction. About the only thing that is codified is the framework API itself. Everything else seems to be fair game for change.

Again, a strong leader would change the team dynamics from their own segmented tasks and provide effective co-ordination. Why ? Because it would be their responsibility, their accountability to keep this product on track for delivery. This would (also) potentially get the rest of the teams in line as the teams themselves would be opened up to greater accountability and transparency.

Re: What is the future for joomla? | Joomla GPS - brian.teeman.net

Lawrence Meckan — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 05:18:14 -0000

Paul's right. The conflicts and negative vibe between various parts of the community are just the symptoms of something more profound. They are not the cause.

Find the cause, and fix it. That's the real dragon we have to face.

Kudos to Ryan for stepping up to the plate.

Though, of course, you could take the Chainsaw Dunlap approach.

Fire everyone and start it all again. (just kidding.)

Re: What is the future for joomla? | Joomla GPS - brian.teeman.net

Lawrence Meckan — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 09:16:33 -0000

One of the key features of the open source movement, as spoken of through the Cathedral and the Bazaar, is egoless programming.

That means the programmers involved have the courage / thick skin to cop a bad review of their actions, their code and their product and actually work with that feedback, instead of projecting their ego / attacking the feedback or messenger. They have to welcome feedback in whatever form and live with it, not defend themselves. Admitting they are wrong / don't know it all .. at times also helps.

Since we have no benevolent dictator within Joomla, we have no way of measuring whether the staff we have on board are actually protecting their ego or not. It's all segmented away so nobody is held really accountable for their actions. This also provides another way of keeping ego-fed programmers within the system.

A key example of this would be the GPL debate 2 years ago where the issues were handballed between the Core Team, the Foundation team, OSM and "talk to your lawyer". Nobody at the end of the day was held accountable for that PR disaster (or the subsequent disasters between the Core and third party developers over the next year or so).

Joomla is running a PR campaign at the moment that they're changing, being more open and all. Where is the actions, the outcome, the welcoming of new and diverse opinions and code as part of this change?

Re: What is the future for joomla? | Joomla GPS - brian.teeman.net

Lawrence Meckan — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 08:48:46 -0000

Not at all controversial.

Problem is: there never has and never will be a single benevolent leader, due to the structure (politics?) surrounding Joomla. I know, Shayne, Andrew and a few others talked at length about this sort of thing a while back.

Which then belies the need for a calm, consistent voice providing leadership. Leadership involves politics and negotiation and dissent, something Joomla doesn't do well. It's got a lot of evangelists (to the point where mob lynchings occur when someone questions the hallowed ground surrounding Joomla) but not a lot of rationality and common sense at times. Political makeup and the discussion of it within Joomla is unwelcome, to the point where community members have been thrown out.

I know they're throwing a whole lot more resources towards the 1.6 to 2.0 development arc, but at the end of the day, more functionality crammed in may end up with the CMS equivalent of Windows Vista. But will it make it a better product? Unsure..

The real problem is that the evangelists will want that role for themselves in order to silence dissent (what they see as "negative energy"/disloyalty regarding Joomla), but a leader always knows that they need someone playing Devils' Advocate to help them with their own blind spots in order to deliver a much more sound and stable product.

Re: Joomla usability improvements? | Joomla GPS - brian.teeman.net

Lawrence Meckan — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 21:22:05 -0000

Why not?

A design contest is the antithesis of statistical analysis of user behavior. Crowdsourcing design and placing in a contest format is spec work, and spec work is evil. Not to mention usability involves more than just screencaps, especially with AJAX involvement.

Like any real designer knows, even if you create the perfect solution 2 hours or 2 days into a project, it still takes 6 months of hard data/analysis/business case work to get management on board to approve it. A design contest removes the need for qualitative research, which Barrie and myself recognise is needed more than anything else.

I know most of the OSS world runs on crowdsourcing talent (Joomla crowdsourcing it's logo for instance), but in this instance qualitative measurement is a better response than a mob vote at the end of the design process.

Hard qualitative data is something that always seems to be missing from most OSS work, mainly due to the evangelists for the various projects glossing over the issues in order to market it. Drupal and Wordpress have got better at it. They at least did some usability testing, even if it was internalized. Joomla lags behind.

And, yes, Dan, I will be doing exactly that. Taking the UI behaviours outside of the realms of tech aware people. Once this first phase has finished with the ACL, I'll be expanding it across all the behaviours and grabbing data/feedback channels.

Re: Joomla usability improvements? | Joomla GPS - brian.teeman.net

Lawrence Meckan — Sat, 30 May 2009 02:24:38 -0000

Fotis, not everything runs off K2. It'd be nice to, but you're competing against 3000+ other CMTP on the JED. That's 3000+ other instances where people have to consider usability in interacting with Joomla (not including Core built CMTPs as well).