Following in Jen's footsteps on her recent rant about dropdown menus, it's time I got something off my chest about programming styles and standards. There are many levels of coding standards. But the one I'm on a tear about today involves writing Joomla! 1.5 extensions.

I was asked to look into an issue regarding an extension we are using here at 4Web. This is the first time I've looked into the code and I was pretty disappointed at what I saw. One of the reasons I so love writing extensions for J!15 is because the core team has done what I consider a fabulous job of creating a flexible, organized, easily understandable (even by me!) extremely extensible structure and API for creating components, plugins and modules. It has been rare (and increasingly so) in my thirty eight years of experience to find code this well structured.

Programming is, or can be, an art. We each have a style and an approach to coding unique to ourselves. And if we're paying attention, our own style evolves. Heck, half the time I look at code I wrote five years ago and can't figure what in the world I was thinking. Looking at someone else's code can be a nightmare of galactic proportion. This creates difficulties in maintaining code and is one reason standards have come to be seen as important in some circles.

One of the more exciting improvements in Joomla! 1.5 is the idea of template overrides. Joomla! templates can be thought of as a wrapper for displaying content produced by the various Joomla! components, modules and plugins/mambots. If you've ever created your own template, you know that there is special code you place throughout it to display that content. You can carefully create html according to your own exacting standards, but the results of all those modules in the left position, for example will still produce whatever html those modules were programmed to produce.

So let's say you've decided to create a website that does not use all those nested tables. You could create a Joomla! template that is all divs and no tables, but the individual Joomla! extensions will still be outputting those pesky nested tables.

With modules, you at least have the choice of using the tableless 'xhtml' style. But here again, the style attribute only tells Joomla! how to wrap the content produced by the module. The module itself may still be outputting table tags that you would rather not see used.

It is well known that the media manager, fabulous as it is, has a history of quirky and difficult problems. As we moved our sites to our new server, I found another fun one.

While we were at Joomla Chicago, we met the good folk at midPhase.com. We were impressed and heard a number of good things about them.