My two weeks of respite from UNIMA Aus. website design have been up for a few days now and I’m ploughing through getting some major design changes working. Most of it was done within a day or so, but I have been stuck trying to get Joomla’s (shitty) core program to work with modules.

You see, using Joomla is kind of backwards. Normally when creating a website, you make a page, and then add a menu link to it. Even b2evo, my blog program, runs like this. Then, if you want ‘modules’ (widgets when using b2evo) of specific things, like a range of menu links, banners, etc., you just assign a module to that page.

More info on the image to the right below…

Joomla however, is screwed. You have to make a menu link, then assign content to it (meaning, if I just wanted no content on that page, but all modules, or just a menu link, it doesn’t let you do it) and only then can you assign a module to it. Yep, completely backwards logic. But then, you also can’t assign a module to just one page; because you can only have menu links + content (rather than content on a menu link), you then have to assign a module to that menu link. Which causes all sorts of problems if you have say, a menu link that has content that links to another content page that isn’t on a menu link… er, yeah, it’s just that confusing.

So as you can imagine, it takes a lot of time to not only assign everything to the right place, but to find conflicts between all the assignments, and then go back and discover that the conflict you fixed caused another one. 

But enough of my whining…

I really have been doing other things. I had finished (finally) my latest shadow puppet last week, but unfortunately have not been able to film it yet. My foam-board screens have finally killed the legs - and the screen just falls over - and my wooden frame screen has a huge scratch in the silk. So I have to repair them before doing anything else. Anyway, when I finished cutting out the laminated pieces of my puppet, and prepared them for stringing, I laid them all out next to their patterns. And was inspired to take a photo. You can see how I’ve highlighted certain areas of the pattern with vague penciling in various colours - this tells me which colours go where, and where to put the darker highlights for shading. Although the character came out well, I left the cardboard out too long and it seems that too much aeration makes the cardboard - and therefore the pencil - gritty. Still, side by side with the goddess shadow puppet, he looks pretty good. … You can click on the pic for a larger view and see a bit more of the details.

Oh yes, one other thing… this guy looked very Christmas-Santa-Clausey, with all the red. The boots initially were going to be red too, but luckily changed them to brown. I’m still not sure whether it avoids the Santa look, but at least it’s less Santa-y than I thought it would be.

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