You may have noticed a slight change in the site design. Last night and early today I implemented a change in the menu system that displays our main top drop down (horizontal is the correct term) menus. I first developed the menus using a JavaScript-based software component that plugged into our Adobe Dreamweaver development environment. Then we upgraded to Adobe’s CS3 development system, which includes a very similar menu system called Spry. I started to look at the differences between the two systems, finally determining that the Spry system would speed up our page load times, meaning our pages would be more responsive. Spry also does not use an image background, meaning few graphic files have to be loaded, adding to its speed and responsiveness. Now our top banner is the same brown color as the rest of our boxes and such. Finally, I felt more confident that the Spry menus would solve some of our compatibility problems:
- Menus looked and operated differently with our knowledgebase software.
- I had to do some kludgy patching of our blog software to get the old menus to even work and they still looked out of sorts with the rest of the presentation.
The SPRY menus seemed to solve all of that, at least in the test pages I did.
Well let me tell you, I should have tested more. Updating the site menus means that I must cut/paste our page header (the logo, building images, and menus at the top, including any left side navigation or right-side advertisement areas) and the page footer (banner ads, Google tracking code, and bottom of the page links) into ten different software components:
- Support Desk
- Support Knowledgebase (Kb)
- Forums / image gallery (they share the same theme code)
- aMember (our membership management system)
- Sampler Kb
- Primary Music Kb
- Primary Kb
- Seminary Kb
- Shopping Cart
- Other static pages, like our home page.
Of course I usually get half way through the list and run into a problem. Last night was no different. The new menu JavaScript code did not want to play nicely with the Smarty template system used by our Kb software. So that meant that four different parts were all broken. Fortunately, the Smarty system is open source software, which in many cases means better support and documentation than purchased software. This is not always the case, but a widely used system like Smarty had more than enough information; I found a solution and soon had the menus NOT blowing up the Kb software.
Finally, may I please tell you how much I HATE Internet Explorer (IE). More hacks and workarounds have to be used simply because Microsoft makes its own standards, expecting everyone else to just march along behind them. Our new menus looked dreadful when viewed with Internet Explorer. I normally use Firefox, which is more secure, more feature-rich, extensible, and faster. I only use IE to test login problems. However, this time I didn’t test the menus in IE very well. They looked DREADFUL, like something hacked together by an amateur like me. Again, back to the Dreamweaver Spry support systems, where I found only a single reference to the blotchy and misaligned display I was seeing. A Spry update was suggested.
After I installed the update and compared the new Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) file with the old one, I was able to experiment with some of their updated CSS adjustments and get the menus to work equally as well in Firefox and IE. Yeah! Finally success, but achieved at the cost of sleep deprivation. Sometimes with my head down I can work a problem for hours and lose track of time. So sometime after my wife and son left for work, I finally felt the site was stable enough that I could nap.
So, there you have it; a day in the life, or since I work mostly the graveyard shift, should I say, night in the life of a web developer. Now where’s my pillow?
