Joomla Dashboard

Joomla is a popular open source content management system (CMS) with hundreds of extensions created by 3rd party developers and widely use in the PHP realm. By the amount of extension one has to put together to create a complete site, this can become a maintenance nightmare and turns out to be much more expensive than implementing the same site in Business Feather.
I?ll explain just some of the things that can go wrong if you create your site on Joomla and how Business Feather solves those problems.

Picture the scenario of using Joomla and 3 extensions. The first is for e-commerce, the second is for handling an image gallery and the third is a forum. Updating the system can become a nightmare and expensive since extensions only work with specific versions of Joomla. This means that you won?t be able to update your site until all extensions you are using are compatible with the version of Joomla you are about to update.

While some businesses can relay on the creators of the extensions (3rd party developers), it proves to be dangerous for smart business owners like you for the following reasons:

• You don’t know who is developing the extension.
• Second, you don’t know if he/she will keep updating the extension or at least update it to work with future versions of Joomla.

On the other hand the vast majority of the websites require some form of customization over the extension. If you customize it, the code of the extension will change and it guarantees that you won’t be able to update it anymore because the code will be different. You will have to hire another developer to custom hack the upgrade and make it work if it is possible at all.

We created an experiment where we installed 40 Joomla extensions on a site without doing custom work on them. We expected them to work, but by the extension number 12 the system was throwing errors left and right. When we installed all of them, we could not access the Public site at all. Consequently, we started looking for a reliable solution we could offer our clients.

Business Feather Dashboard

This research lead us to Business Feather. it is developed by a team of Engineers and all the extensions are developed by the same people and integrated to the system from day one. This ensures that the system will run smoothly even when using all the extensions.

Since Business Feather is a hosted solution, it is constantly being updated so that you always have the latest version. The team of engineers makes sure all modules work perfectly before updates are push to production; therefore, you can rest assure that your Online Business will work.

Business Feather is created in such a way that all the modules are customizable 100% so that we can extend the functionality without breaking the system.

Our past experiences with Joomla have proven that it is unmaintainable for projects where a business depend on their online presence. We only recommend using Joomla for personal sites that have little action going on. This experiences made us look for a system we can rely on and we found Business Feather. So far the experience is top notch and we recommend it to everybody. The system is updated twice a week, they have an API for sophisticated customizations, the customer support is top notch and the quality of the extensions is super. Go ahead and give it a try.

We just found this great article about how to think strategically when designing online business. Let’s face it, Web Design is not Art. The strategy ought to be designed to fulfill your business goals witch generally involve filling out a web-form - you better make them short a pretty!.

Playing is a big part of any living organism life. To let go of yourself, of your mind and just interact how your body wants to. We see animals all the time playing, and it does not matter how old they are they love to play.

Human beings are the ‘most intelligent’ creatures on earth, yet we are the ones that have forgotten about playing. We were all once kids, remember that feeling? of just not wanting to do anything else but play. This is a very healthy feeling, it is a feeling of happiness, freedom.

So, the question now is, do you play with your process? You being a designer or developer, should be able to have fun with what you do. For the creative minds the process is a bit harder, why? because you need to let go, most professions do not let you or want you to let go, but hey! we have the advantage, the great advantage that ours encourages us to let go!

Tips to play with your process:

? Start your project by brainstorming, but do not do a formal aligned to the parallel? brainstorm. Get yourself a big piece of paper, board anything big! some markers and start to scramble thoughts, the messier the better!

? Mess around with your project. Once you are prepared for doing something in the computer, do it your way, present innovative ideas, ideas of your own. Now, off course there are always sticky clients with big ego trips, that want things done their way, hey! save different versions or use a great tool called github. That way you can have both versions, the one your client will approve just because it is done the way he/she wanted. And the other version which let you play.

? Have projects of your own. This is the best way to really play. You are your own decision maker and you have total freedom of what to do and what direction to take.

Conclusion: Get yourself out of any type of routine, and play!