Move forward ten years, though, and I’m stunned at how many companies still use their in-house content management systems as a selling point. They’re taking advantage of the lack of knowledge of potential clients. There’s no upside for a client to use an agency’s own content management system. But it’s a great scam if you can get them to agree.

In-House Content Management Systems Aren’t Very Good

I’ve had the joys of using a few content management systems that were exclusive to a particular developer or agency. They’re usually terrible. Difficult to use, lacking extensibility, clunky and primitive. They may very well have been great a decade ago when there weren’t other options, but most of them haven’t moved on from that point.

Open source options are so much better. WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!, ExpressionEngine and the many other options are fighting it out in a competitive market. It means they’re continually improving their function and usability; they *have* to. Luckily, the open source community means they’ve got a huge pool of coders who can contribute to ensure those improvements are implemented quickly and effectively.

And that open source competition means that the paid solutions have also had to raise their game. If there’s good stuff out there for free, then widely available CMS that expect you to pay for them better be *damn* good if they’re going to succeed commercially.

They’re A Crap Deal For The Client

In-house content management systems are a pain because they tie the client to the agency that provided the original service. That raises more than one problem;

Who do you pay to fix a problem?

The original agency. They developed the tool, they’re probably the only ones who can fix it quickly.

How do you implement new functionality?

Say you’ve realized the importance of a Twitter feed to your business, or adding a blog, video, podcasts, or any other new idea. Widely available content management systems, whether open source or commercial, need to respond to demand, so they implement new functionality. Not the case if you’re stuck with an exclusive CMS. Until your agency adds that function, you’re stuck.

You’re Trapped

In a bunch of ways. You’re trapped with your original agency. It’s probably why they gave you the exclusive content management system in the first place, because it forces long term repeat business. But you’re also trapped when you want to fire Ted, your own web guy, because he’s been stealing from petty cash. Who else out there is going to be familiar with your content management system? Nobody.

Pity you didn’t have a widely acknowledged content management system. Then you’d have a pool of great talent to draw from, talent that would be able to get to work on your needs immediately.

Avoid Them Like The Plague

Unless you have *very* specialized needs (and most likely even if you do), there’s no need for you to use an agency’s own content management system. If they’re offering you one then they’re doing so for the wrong reasons, they’re doing so because it’s good for *them* when they should be thinking about the best service for *you*.

Any web designer you hire should be offering you a widely available content management system option, whether it’s open source or commercial. Ask them about the different options. A good designer should be comfortable working with a couple of different systems at least, so they can offer a solution that’s best suited to your needs.

If a designer still insists that their own in-house content management system is the best option, they’re lying. Don’t ask them to justify it, because they can’t.

Designing For My Site?

JomSocial ships with four base templates. They’re OK, functional if not amazingly inspired. What I really wanted to do was to develop a template from scratch, but like so many open source applications and plugins, there wasn’t a “blank slate” option to work from. Unfortunately the JomSocial support page on ‘Creating A JomSocial Template’ just has a “coming soon” note on it, and to be fair the application developers make it clear they aren’t supporting templating queries.

It always surprises me that so few applications have a blank template option. There’s a couple of WordPress ones out there, including a recent and excellent guide from Themeshaper on creating a theme from scratch. It’s a much better way to work as a designer, dealing with other people’s code is never that much fun and a lot of the time application developers include a lot of unnecessary structure into the layout HTML.

Starting From Scratch

What I wanted, then, was a blank template to start my JomSocial design from. If the resources aren’t out there then it’s best to go ahead and make them yourself. So I took the default template, copied all the files, and went through all 96 of them stripping out every piece of extraneous information I could find. I wanted to get as close as possible to raw data output as I could – JomSocial’s functionality is awesome – without the surrounding code. That meant removing inline styling, tables, lists, tags and classes from all the files, and structuring them as simply as possible. That provides a blank canvas to work from.

A Resource For Everyone

I’ve benefitted from the blank templates that others have put together for various open source applications. I’m going to pass on that benefit – you can download the blank JomSocial template at the end of this article.

Bear in mind that this is NOT the finished product. I’m aware that there are a couple of PHP glitches (though many of them can be solved by referring to the equivalent .php file in JomSocial’s default template, and comparing code). You’ll also need to add the “hasTip” class to thumbnail images that you want a tooltip for. The images directory is exactly the same as the JomSocial default template. I’m continuing to eliminate these problems as I work with the template more often.

Despite the issues, though, my design work for JomSocial has become much more efficient and much more enjoyable since I created the blank canvas template. I hope that other designers will find it worthwhile, and it might lead to growth in templating options for what is a genuinely excellent Joomla! plugin.

JomSocial Blank Template (draft version)

Insights

Interlinking your own blog posts is really useful, not just for SEO purposes but because you’ll probably blog about the same kind of thing a lot. It’s a pain to link those posts though, because you have to find the relevant post, copy the URL and then go back to your editing window to add it to your text. It used to drive me crazy. Insights fixed it though, because it let me search my own blog directly from the post editor, so I can quickly find my other posts and insert links.

Insights does a bunch more as well. It’s like adding a great dedicated search bar to your WordPress admin section. While you’re writing a post you can find internal links, pictures, books, news, Wikipedia articles, or just search Google. Then you can just as quickly use the plugin to add links and images to your text. It’s absolutely invaluable.

pageMash

Take a look at the WordPress codex. There’s a lot of advice on how to tweak your template code to call or exclude specific pages from menus, how to administer sub-pages, etc. Good advice, but it’s all about coding and it’s not the most user friendly of options. pageMash renders a lot of the advice redundant by letting you do all this page administration from within your WordPress admin section.

Really simple. Install the plugin, and you can drag and drop your pages into the order you want (great for overriding the default order that WordPress places on pages). You can hide pages from the main menu, quickly see page IDs, and generally just create the page structure you want in a user friendly graphical interface.

Advanced Excerpt

Excerpts are really handy in WordPress. They’re great for listing search results or archival material, linking to posts from a front page, etc. They’re also not very flexible. The standard WordPress excerpt is a set number of characters, it strips HTML tags, and it uses carriage returns instead of the paragraph tag. We could really do with greater functionality.

…which we now have, with Advanced Excerpt. Great plugin that lets you choose which HTML tags each excerpt will keep, and which it will strip. It lets you define the number of characters in an excerpt. You can override the standard the_excerpt tag in your code, and also use the_advanced_excerpt to tweak things more directly (e.g. you can have different excerpts calling different numbers of characters – I do that on my blog index page).

One of the problems with a content management system like Joomla is providing a varied number of layouts. With a single base template file from which the site’s appearance is developed, it’s easy to end up with a site that looks good but doesn’t provide much flexibility. The template loads certain CSS files which define the layout of the HTML, and that’s that. But what if you want some pages to have a two column layout, others to have three columns, or you want to switch menu positions depending on the page people are browsing to? That’s more complicated.

Loading Modules On A Joomla! Page

Joomla! uses modules for much of the page functionality outside the main content. Modules can be pretty much any kind of functionality, and you can specify different modules to load only on certain pages within Joomla!. You can also define various tags which can be linked to each module within the Joomla! administration.

The code within the index.php template file for including a module would be something like this:

countModules(‘user1′)) : ?>

In the Joomla administration section you would assign to a module two variables – the (in this case “user1″) and the pages on which it loads (all the pages on a site, selected pages, or no pages at all). When the page loads it checks if there the module is specified to load on the page, and its assigned .

Tweaking The Code To Allow Conditional Stylesheets

Let’s say I have three pages on a site. A homepage, a ‘latest news’ page, and an ‘about us’ page. I want the homepage to be a dual column layout, the latest news page to be three column, and the about us page to be single column. Yet in the index.php header I’m only loading specific stylesheets from my Joomla template. I can vary the content of the pages easily enough from the Joomla! admin, but how do I change the layout?

Check the code above again. It’s a pretty simple PHP function that says “if x is true, then do y”. In this case, if there is a module for this page with the “user1″ then activate this jdoc:include function to load the module. Except there’s nothing at all to say that we have to put a jdoc:include function in that PHP. We can put any code we want in there. We don’t have to tell it to load the module, we can put any code in there to activate when the module is active in Joomla!

So how about this?

countModules(‘user1′)) : ?>

When the page loads it still checks to see if the module is specified, and its assigned position, but it doesn’t load the module. Instead it loads the stylesheet that we’ve specified.

Putting The Elements Together

Defining the element

Joomla! templates have a templateDetails.xml file. In that file you can specify the following:

…

dualcolumn

threecolumn

singlecolumn …

These positions will then be available to assign to modules in the Joomla! administration.

Creating the module

In the Joomla! administration, go to Module Manager and create a new module. It doesn’t actually matter what the content of the module is, because we’re not loading it, instead we’re just using it to activate stylesheets. I tend to choose the ‘Custom HTML’ module type. Name the module something appropriate. Then define the “Position” of the module to the that we defined in the XML file, and use the “Menu Assignment” option to specify which pages we want to have that layout.

So for example I mentioned above I create a module that is called “Layout – Single Column”, I set the “Position” to be “singlecolumn” and I assign the module to be active on the ‘About Us’ page. I then create other “Layout – Dual Column” and “Layout – Three Column” modules and configure them as necessary.

Defining the index.php

I place the following in the section of the index.php page, after the code which loads the universal stylesheets for the page.

countModules(’singlecolumn’)) : ?>

countModules(‘dualcolumn’)) : ?>

countModules(‘threecolumn’)) : ?>

Now, when the page loads the ‘About Us’ page it will search for the singlecolumn.css file, which will define the layout, the homepage will search for the dualcolumn.css and the ‘Latest News’ page will find the threecolumn.css.

More Flexible Joomla! Design

The example I’ve used here demonstrates how you can use this method to define different column layouts to the same Joomla! template file. You’re loading seperate stylesheet files, though, so it’s far more flexible than that. More extensive stylesheets could see different pages within the same Joomla! site have entirely different appearances in color, font style, background images, really the options are as varied as your styling options are.

I’ve found the ability to vary the appearance of pages within a single Joomla! site using this method has given me far more creative control, leading to better designs and more user appropriate results.

I wanted to highlight two I’ve come across recently that can really benefit your social networking life. They’re very different from each other, but both can help you to develop wider and more worthwhile relationships in the blogosphere, and give you the opportunity to add value.

Twitter2friendfeed – because you’re leaving Twitter, right?

That’s the trend anyway. Too many people annoyed at Twitter’s downtimes. Friendfeed’s increased functionality and reliability. And because it’s the fashionable thing to do right now, yes?

Except you’ve got hundreds of people you follow on Twitter, and it’d take forever to add them all manually on Friendfeed. So you add the few most important and live a life split between Friendfeed and Twitter because you can’t move your entire contact list over.

Until you use Twitter2friendfeed at least. It automatically runs through all of the people you follow on Twitter, and subscribes to every match it can find on friendfeed. Simple, but highly effective. And in a cool retro text program format!

It really was a lifesaver for me, because I wanted to increase my usage of friendfeed but didn’t have time to manually move my contacts over. And that was just following 113 people. Can’t imagine how useful the app could be for people who have several hundred or a thousand people they follow on Twitter.

I still use Twitter regularly, I’m not jumping ship because despite the problems I still like the app. But now I can get the best of both worlds, maximising my Twitter and my FriendFeed usage.

Comment Info Tip – rubbish name, cool app

I genuinely can’t remember which blog I saw this on first. I guess kind of a hint there, that I remembered the app before I remember the blog. Comment Info Tip is a recently developed WordPress plugin that gives some public information about your commenters, and interactivity with their blogs.

It’s particularly good for your regular commenters. It’ll list the last three posts that they commented on, highlighting their contribution to the discussion. And if they have a blog it’ll grab a snippet from their last blog post, with a link to that post. All of which appears in a mini popup when you mouseover the commenter’s name. It’ll also highlight pingbacks and trackbacks.

All of which is great for developing a more interactive relationship with your visitors. It highlights and rewards the people who contribute regularly. The link to their last post is particularly handy. Unlike the similar CommentLuv plugin (which I also like) it checks this link in real time. CommentLuv adds a link back to a commenter’s latest post at the time of their comment. The Info Tip gives a link back to their latest post as of now.

Main flaw for me so far is with the interal links of the popup. I use SEO friendly URLs with WordPress. But when the popup links to “last posts commented on” in my blog it uses the default www.blogname.com/?p=35 addresses. That doesn’t impact on functionality, but does have a minor impact on SEO and also isn’t great for analysing web stats.