Subterranean Website Blues

Haven’t posted in a long time, so I’m going to vent my spleen on a few particularly annoying issues I’ve been dealing with for a few weeks. Maybe someone will notice.

My latest client uses Yahoo’s storefront for their website. They’re still fairly new, but very serious about establishing an e-commerce presence. They have various non-profit ventures that all funnel profits into other non-profit charities. These ventures essentially serve as fundraisers, so they need a checkout capability, hence the Yahoo.

I successfully managed to move them to a dedicated server, bypassing Yahoo entirely and directing checkouts straight to Paypal for processing.

We’re up and running on the new dedicated, I’ve got a prototype (mostly) ready, and I need to soft-transfer the domain’s DNS so that e-mails start flowing into the new server.

Problem: Yahoo ties your ability to change DNS into the services you’ve selected. This is an obvious attempt at idiot-proofing their service, but it translates into a near-guarantee of downtime during domain transfer.

Since Yahoo is also a domain registrar, annoying customers who might want to move to a more advanced solution (that Yahoo doesn’t offer, and probably couldn’t effectively offer without making a major reorganization) and costing themselves the marginal business they might have retained. $10 a year or so for domain registration is still $10. Whereas multiplying by zeros still results in zero. Wise up, Y!

….

With another client, I’d invested a considerable amount of time in convincing him to move to Joomla. As he was using XOOPS, this was actually quite easy.

What ensued, on the other hand, has not been.

The client has suffered from a common malady amongst new-adopters of CMS systems, the desire to have a end-all, be-all, totally pimped-out website.

This is totally common….and you know what? It’s also totally understandable. In the early goings of a new website, it’s natural to want to try new stuff….crazy stuff, even. You want to be able to mash these components up and result with something new and different.

I’ve succumbed to this desire myself, a couple times, before I realized the disparate user interfaces inherent in many of the 3PD components could be sufficiently confusing to end-users as to invalidate the purpose behind a CMS to begin with.

The particular issues with this client seem to revolve around component programmers wanting to jump on the AJAX bandwagon, but doing so in tragic ways.

In this case, the client wants to use EZRealty integrated into Joomla and Community Builder to geocode the locations of available homes into a Google Map. A lot of Java, and he also needs/wants a Java-based slide-out menu for navigation because of the complexity and disparate content he intends to offer. These two bits of code, along with other bits of java, are interacting in really terrible ways. The geocoding javascript actually errors out in Internet Explorer, which is still an undesirable position to be in.

You should never have to insert a piece of Javascript globally with the intent to affect a single component. There needs to be some means to easily include pertinent code snippets in a component-specific basis.

I can think of two intermediate-to-advanced ways:

1.) Use a “mod_anything” type module, which allows input of PHP/Javascript/HTML in a module. This carries the obvious security problems.

2.) Use a if loop, combined with mosCountModules, to conditionally load the code, which is inconvenient due to the fact that you’re then bound to insert some blank module position and accompanying blank module.

Anyone have better ideas?