How to fix xhtml and css validation errors in Virtuemart

In case you don’t already know, Virtuemart is an online shopping cart extension for Joomla! and is often listed as one of the most popular Joomla! extensions available.

Last week I received a private message on our forum from one of our members saying that his Virtuemart store was failing css validation and asked whether i would take a look to see if the issue was related to the template, or his Virtuemart setup. After taking a look at the validation error and the xhtml output, it was easy to spot what was causing the problem. (more…)

Tags: , , , ,

SEF urls | More than just good looks.

SEF urls not only look good, but they make your site harder to hack. Enabling SEF urls in your Joomla backend is a great thing to learn how to do.

google1

SEF urls serves as a dual purpose feature

The biggest advantage to SEF urls is that your website viewers and users will have pretty urls  to look at. (more…)

Tags: ,

Taking Joomla’s page suffix feature to new heights

This blog post is written in relation to this previous blog post: “Rational Magic and new menu system” The page suffix feature in Joomla! is one that is often under-utilized. The idea behind page suffix is to give you additional control over an individual page of your website. An example of this could be setting a custom background image on a specific page. The way the default Joomla page suffix is setup, this wouldn’t actually be possible, but the theory is there ;0)

Problems with default page suffix in Joomla

The problem with the way the default page suffix is setup in Joomla is that when you add a custom page suffix for a page, some of the elements on that page get messed up (i.e. the content heading and what not). The other problem is that, in order to really take advantage of this, the page suffix actually needs to be set on a much higher element on the page, i.e. as a class on the body element. (more…)

Tags: , ,

Build your Joomla site locally and faster… Extended.

Matt wrote an excellent post on time-saving tools for designing and developing your Joomla!. He’s right, you can save substantial time by installing a local server environment. As well, these tools provide a great platform for learning. Since he’s the Mac pro, I thought it would be of use to include some handy Windows tools… JSAS is a light-weight, reliable, and quick way to install all your necessary servers, databases, and Joomla! files. This downloads in seconds and is up and running in no time on your local machine. What many people don’t realize is that you can actually use JSAS to develop/design several other open source apps such as WordPress or Drupal. (more…)

Tags: ,

MarkItUp – A lightweight, powerful and flexible editor engine

Whilst doing my usual rounds on the web this morning, I stumbled across a real gem. This particular gem is a simple (yet incredibly powerful) Markup Editor. You may be thinking that this is another WYSIWYG Editor (What You See Is What You Get), but it is a bit different. With a true WYSIWYG Editor it is exactly that – what your seeing is how your content will look. You don’t actually see the markup (code) that constructs the html output. In the case of a Markup Editor, when you select one of the easily recognizable buttons for H1, H2, H3, Image, Link, etc – it actually outputs the code. You will recognize this behavior from many Forums, which often use BBCode.

A brief history.. (more…)

Tags: , , ,