Code Culture

Genome Diagnostics aims to offer accurate diagnostic tools to facilitate donor/recipient matching, ultimately leading to higher success rates of bone-marrow, cord blood and stem cell transplantations.

I did a quick restyle of the Joomla template to reflect the new, cleaner design.

Early 2010 I've redesigned the templates of the Flevoziekenhuis. The old templates really needed an update. This assignment was granted very late in the process of introducing the new corporate identity. The Flevoziekenhuis hospital building was already decorated with the new logo. And print communications and other media outings were already branded according to the new style designed by Different View.

Harm Henstra is a coach and interim manager based in Haarlem. He needed a small, straightforward website to present himself and his services. So rapidly I put up a new Joomla installation. After a short planning meeting Harm wrote most of the content in his new website. I structured it and filled the site. We jointly choose a stock template and I adapted the colours and feel to his corporate identity. Next, we put up the "pawn" images and portraits to finish the global layout.

Correct SEF routing in Joomla is pretty easy thanks to the class JRoute. If you want to redirect to a clean url just use the basic method _(); like so:

JRoute::_('index.php?option=com_example&task=view');

Unfortunately, this method isn't aware of url aliases created in menu items. JRoute just alters a dirty url like /index.php?option=com_example&task=view in a clean url like /components/example/view. Let's say you've created menu item to this components task with the alias: /view-example. JRoute doesn't redirect to the alias, just to the cleaned up system url. This is a problem because menu items are essential if you want to define page parameters or module visibility. These parameters are only visible if the url matches exactly. If you want to create redirects to url aliases in your Joomla modules or components you can try the following snippet.

$menu =& JSite::getMenu();
$menu_items = $menu->_items;
foreach($menu_items as $item) {
    $match = 0;
    if($item->query['option'] == 'com_example')    $match = $match+1;
    if($item->query['task'] == 'view') $match = $match+1;
 
    $matches[$match] = $item->route;
}
if(key_exists(1, $matches)) {
    array_shift($matches);
    array_reverse($matches, false);
 
    $action_url = JRoute::_(JUri::base(true).'/'.$matches[0]);
}

This will create a path to a single alias created in a menu item if a matching menu item exists. You can also do this for other components by specifying the match criteria. For example: