Over the weekend I was asked how to create a joomla 4 module to display images in an attractive way without installing and third party extensions. I did this for the gallery on the home page of my demo site (https://www.testingthis.website) and I realised I had never shared the steps taken to achieve it ..read more

Showcasing the power of Joomla 4 out of the box with no additional extensions I produced this website (https://www.testingthis.website). One of the features I created was a masonry style view (https://www.testingthis.website/trips) with no javascript or css edits - just some simple template overrides ..read more

Showcasing the power of Joomla 4 out of the box with no additional extensions I produced this website (https://www.testingthis.website). One of the features I created was a masonry style view (https://www.testingthis.website/trips) with no javascript or css edits - just some simple template overrides ..read more

Unlike many other CMS that are page based, Joomla is much more dynamic with everything based on the menu item. When you select a menu item Joomla decides which view to display, which blocks to display and even which theme. One of the major advantages of this approach is that content can inherit the settings of a parent so you don't have to design every page. At the same time this inheritance can be source of confusion, despair and even anger ..read more

After seven years of hosting all my sites and my client's sites with SiteGround I've moved everything to a new hosting provider, ScalaHosting. I've held on to this post for a few months to make sure that everything worked as intended. I wouldn't want to publish a recommendation until I had truly tested it in the real world ..read more

To make a powerful application such as Joomla understandable is not an easy task. It is something that I think we have done a reasonable job with over the years but there is always room for improvement ..read more

Web accessibility is the process of making sure that your website is accessible to everyone. Far too many people assume that accessibility means adding an alt description to an image and making sure that the colour contrast is ok. Perhaps they have even heard of something called WCAG or ARIA. Or maybe they have even used a browser based accessibility checker tool. Those are all important but they are only a small part to removing barriers ..read more

Joomla means “all together”. From the founding of Joomla we have taken pride in reducing the barriers to entry. We removed the barrier of cost, we removed the barrier of language and we removed the barriers to change found in a closed source application. For many years we have talked about responsive web design - the ability to use a website on any device. What we don’t talk about is responsible web design - the ability for everyone to use a web site equally ..read more

I have organised, presented at and attended more conferences than is probably good for me. I have always been in favour of multi-track events with many sessions at the same time. My experience at the last two conferences I attended, both of which had over 15 simultaneous sessions, has changed my mind. In the past I thought it was beneficial to offer a large choice of sessions to ensure that there was always something of interest available to all attendees. That was wrong. A conference is not about the sessions that are of interest to you. It should be about the sessions that are beneficial to ..read more

Showcasing the power of Joomla 4 out of the box with no additional extensions I produced this website (https://www.testingthis.website). One of the features I created was a masonry style view (https://www.testingthis.website/trips) with no javascript or css edits - just some simple template overrides. The tutorial below is for creating that view using custom fields. For a slightly simpler version using tags see the Joomla Tags As Custom Filters.   Setup Create a single category called Trips Create a field group with the exact same name as the category. Create the custom fields y ..read more