Sometimes you want to create more than one link to a given item in your Joomla site. Let's say you have an article that you want to show up as subnavigation under Item A and Item B on your menu.

You could create two identical articles, linking one to Item A and the other to Item B. We used to do that in the static HTML days. Unfortunately, that generally meant that you had a maintenance nightmare, since when the page's content changed, you had to change it in two places.

With Joomla, you could create two links, one from Item A and the other from Item B, to the same piece of content. This works, but now you have two different URLs for the same page. That can lose you points in search engines.

Every once in a while, you might want to create links on your website that aren't directly linked to one of the menus displayed on your website.

A great way to accomplish this is to use a hidden menu. Here's how to do it.

1. Go to the back end of Joomla and log in. Under Menus, pick Menu Manager. Click New to create a new menu. Call it hiddenmenu (all one word). Fill in "hiddenmenu" for the 4 blanks presented.

I was recently asked if there was a way to get the topmost menu item in which a page sits. Let's say you have a menu like this:

Item 1
--Item 1.1
--Item 1.2
----Item 1.2.1
Item 2
--Item 2.1
--Item 2.2

Let's say you wanted to do something special with all the menus in the 'Item 1' tree and something slightly different for all the items in the 'Item 2'  tree. You'd want to know which tree you were on. Here is a bit of simple php code you can use the get the top most menu item no matter where in the navigation you are (see php 4 version further down):

I just got back from a great week at Lynda.com, recording two more titles, hopefully out soon.

The first title is "CMS Website Strategy and Planning", and it covers all of the things you should think about and talk about with your client before building your website.

The second title is "Preparing CMS Web Graphics Using Open Source Tools". It covers how to think about a good design for a CMS as well as create an HTML page using GIMP for graphics and KompoZer for writing the HTML and CSS.

We've been working on a rather largish site recently and over the course of recent weeks, I have been reminded of a lesson learned way back in my dark ages when I was designing desktop database applications.

When developing any application but especially a customized application designed for a specific person or company, it can be easy to confuse problems with solutions. In that database I designed so many years ago, the client had been doing things largely on paper for a very long time. By the time I came along they had graduated to using was really not much more than a spreadsheet on steroids. A very rudimentary database system some board member had created in her idle moments.

They had developed ways of thinking about their processes and data that had evolved over decades based on their paper system. And that was translated into the board member's simplistic application. Conversations initially involved them telling me very specifically what my new program needed to do. But as I would look into simply doing what they told me, I would find a number of questions that needed asking. And as I asked questions, they (and I) started to see that what they wanted was actually a solution to a more interesting problem and not at all the best way to address that problem. With practice and attention, it has become almost second nature for me to recognize the difference.

Everywhere you look, usability problems exist everywhere.

Sometimes those usability problems are a direct result of branding.

Let's take this example. Health insurance! Now, there's plenty of usability problems in the health insurance industry, but I want to focus on one tiny little problem, a direct result of branding conflicting with usability.

Know your target audience! And do a little testing before you launch.

Recently, based on recommendations from Jen and myself, another web designer of note moved her hosting to Liquidweb. I'm sorry to say she had an agonizing period of adjustment. It was all about the dreaded file permissions and ownership.

In Mambo and J10, it was often necessary to set certain files and directories to be writable by anyone. Due to the way web servers have traditionally been set up, the only way a system like Joomla could upload files and modify the website's directory structure (when installing an extension for example) was by making the file system, even if only temporarily, writable by the whole world.

We were pleased to see the addition of the ftp layer in Joomla 1.5. It meant not having to open up the file system like this. But even in J15, certain 3rd party extensions require a directory here and there to be set world writable. It has recently come to my attention that some webhosts will shut down your account if any files or directories are set this way.

Those of you who freelance or work for a firm have heard this story before.

The client needs it now! The Joomla site is 90% done and the developer has disappeared and there's just a few more buttons to click and the site will be totally done. The client thinks you can finish this in just a few hours. Plus, of course, you don't have anything else to do, so you can drop everything to get this job done.

Then they find out the price. And they're shocked, shocked!!! at how much it costs to get that little bit of work done. They'll just ask their kid/nephew/the CEO's son/go to eLance and find someone else to do it.

If you ever installed the sample data in Joomla, you've seen that little "welcome" message over on the right side of the screen, right in the control panel.

Ever wondered how to get rid of it? Ever wondered if you could make your own, so that it was actually useful to your client and not just you?

It's easy to do!