Tuesday, 20 September 2011 13:33
In the last few weeks I invested quite some time into reading and thinking about usability. Joomla 1.6/1.7 has made a great leap in terms of functionality, a lot of features are now implemented in a consistent manner and the behavior throughout Joomla is identical. However, while the functionality has been improved a lot, the usability kinda crashed. I personally find 1.6/1.7 a lot harder to use, especially for inexperienced users, than 1.5. The best example for that in my point of view, is the screen to create menu items. When creating an article menu item in 1.5, you had 3 sliders with parameters on the left. In 1.6/1.7 its the baffling number of 7 sliders and each slider contains a lot more parameters than in 1.5.
I think we desperately need to focus on usability again, even if that means that some functionality is removed again. I wont write about what to change in the parameters and all and how to achieve that goal (simply because I don't know) but I want to write about some ideas that I had together with the list views in Joomla. Add a comment
Tuesday, 16 November 2010 11:25
JRouter is the class to manage the routing inside of Joomla to determine which menu item, component and content item to load. This class is currently not consistently coded. JRouter allows you to attach additional rules, but otherwise is static in the way it handles URLs. I've rewritten this class to make it faster, more generic and easier to extend.
First of all, all behaviors of JRouter are now seperate rules, which means that they can be attached, detached and replaced whichever way you want. It also means, that JRouter is identical for all applications. The difference is, that you attach application specific rules instead of having that hard coded in your application specific JRouter class.
The second improvement is a change of the input data. JRouter currently takes URL strings, which it parses several times and re-arranges, returning it again as a string. Before that URL string is created, a developer (normally) has arrays with data, which he then converts to a string, which, in JRouter, is again converted to an array. My rewrite now accepts both a string and an associative array, which makes it easier to create the URLs and it makes the whole run of JRouter noticeably faster.
With this rewrite, changing the behavior and getting for example Wordpress styled URLs, is not a matter of rewriting the whole JRouter class, but only means that a plugin needs to attach a new rule.
Attached is a zipped patch with the changes that I'd like to propose for 1.7
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