Design and Development for a Better Joomla User Experience (UX)

The Joomla! usability project is taking off and we’re incredibly excited about being a part of this!

Put on your headphones and tune in for one of the upcoming interview about this very topic – this time on the JoomStew Radio Show at 16:00 UTC today.

JoomStew says:
We are excited about the outstanding list of developers and experts who have agreed to participate in this series. Tune in every week for Joomla! news, discussions with inspiring people, and maybe some surprises too.”

What’s todays show about (and how do I listen to it)?

Todays guests on JoomStew Radio will be talking about UX design, frameworks and more.

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Tags: development, events, inspire change, Joomla, usability

How to customize the iPhone version of your Morph powered Joomla site

Today, everybody and their dog browse the internet using a mobile device. Mobile browsing is increasing and you can (should?) show your website visitors a different, mobile browsing friendly version of your site.

Based on popular demand, each themelet on the Morph framework has its own unique iPhone layout.

If you’ve enabled iPhone compatibility in Morph’s Configurator, then that’s the layout your website visitors automatically see when browsing your site on an iPhone. As easy as a flip of a switch.

This blog post is focused on how to configure the iPhone version of your Morph powered Joomla website: (more…)

Tags: configurator, framework, Joomla, Morph, themelets, usability

What exactly is Morph for Joomla?

The past 2 weeks I have spent much time in contemplation of the entire concept of Morph. How are we going to explain to the Joomla world exactly what it is? Why do we truly believe this has the ability to transform the way people build websites using Joomla?

The entire concept is very clear in our minds, but it does appear to be some confusion when it comes to the question of…

• exactly what is the Morph framework for Joomla?
• how it can be used to benefit Joomla developers in building websites?

I’d like to add clarity to some of the principles of Morph, address certain misconceptions and give a clearer understanding of what Morph is. (more…)

Tags: development, framework, joomla 1.5, Morph, themelets, usability

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.

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: usability, useful tips

New jQuery plugin targeting usability for password masking on forms

Last month, Jakob Nielsen wrote a blog post titled “Stop Password Masking” – a usability related article on how password masking on web forms, while providing a degree of “over the shoulder” security, is a step backwards regarding usability. Especially with the ever-apparent increase in the use of mobile devices to access online features.

While working on Configurator, the backend UI for our new Template Management System, Morph, we decided on including an option for users to show their password on the login form.

This seemingly easy script however was not available as a jQuery plugin, and the only script we could find online used regular Javascript to add a “show password” option to login forms.
(more…)

Tags: configurator, jquery, Morph, password, plugins, usability