In the computer services industry (Software), there tend to be 2 type of software developments. Customized System Integration(SI) projects and Software Products. SI Projects are one off customized solution developed to suit a particular business need. They tend to range in the thousands of dollars as the system is only sold once. Most consumers will only come into contact with such software at their work place. Software Products on the other hand refer to things like your Microsoft Windows. After developing the product, many copies of it are made to be sold to the rest of the world.
Generally, Customized Systems not only costs more, but also tend to be of lower quality. Quality issues creep in as they are not tested with a large enough user base. It is not surprising to discover new bugs in the software even after it has been commissioned and running for over a year…. And that’s where lucrative maintenance contracts creep in….
Software Products on the other hand tend to be widely tested by their user base. Recently, I had to pick up the loose ends of a project and could not be more disgusted by the development efforts of one of my developers…. It was a Joomla application, done with no regards to the Joomla framework. Darn… looks like there will be heck of a lot of work for me to touch up….
For those of you who are familiar with Joomla, read on… for other more ordinary folks… please ignore this…
1. HardCoded Banner in Default Template
File: templates\rhuk_solarflare_ii
Line: 1033 – 1060
Instead of hard coding this way, we should consider doing up a Banner Module which will read the banner to be displayed from the jos_content
Of course, this will also mean extending jos_content table to store the appropriate banner image location and doing up the extending the necessary administrative input panel for configuration of the content.
While extending the jos_content table, developer should also extend it to store:
Specifications PDF
2. Menu is not done in an extensible way
File: templates\rhuk_solarflare_ii
Line: 1078 – 1121
Menu is fully hard coded into the basic layout. Instead of fully hard coding it, we should leverage on a menu module to display the menu dynamically. Hard coding is not feasible as it does not allow users to add in future pages.
Also looking at these lines, you will noticed that the base menus are image based. This is very, very bad as it means that the base menu items are not extensible…
Thankfully, the sub-item are not image based…. see Lines 850 – 957
File: templates\rhuk_solarflare_ii
Line: 1078 – 1121
3. Hard Coded Profile before the mosMainBody results in the heading being wrong in all the pages.
The problem here is similar to the putting in of the to buy button and the specification button. All the content will be taken from jos_content and have to be rendered on the content page accordingly.
4. Upgrade RS Form to the Pro Version
This is necessary to ensure that the form templates can be saved, i.e. client can use it easily.
5. Consolidation of all the contents by Jiawen and Data Entry by Office Boy
Simultaneously, data must be ported over to the new application.
6. Integration to Buy Now Button
Integration to the Buy Now Button
7. Seminar and Conferences + News Module
Seminar and Conference and News Module to be integrated
8. Find a newsletter module to integrate into system.