According To Ali

As a consultant (I in particular) we love throwing the term best practice whenever and wherever it is convenient. And TBH I am not the only one. Many, if not all, of us (consultants) do this on a perhaps hourly basis. Some possibly enjoy this more than others. There has been times when this has worked for me and times when it worked against me. Really I have mix feeling about it. So, this fine morning I woke up feeling about ranting/venting about it. Caution: This post is a rant and biased based on my opinions (hint hint: This blog site is called "According To Ali"). So let's begin. Let's get our definition part sorted. So here's According to Wiki Wiki says:  " A  best practice  is a method or technique that has been generally accepted as superior to any alternatives because it produces results that are superior to those achieved by other means or because it has become a standard way of doing things, e.g., a standard way of complying with legal or...

theProblem: The front end ( html and css ) is set up such a way that for the description text form a sitecore content needs to have a <p> tag wrapped around it.  Now, I'm sure just by reading the above 2 lines you are thinking "WOW that's really simple and every RTE does that by default. So, continuing to reading this is useless and this guy is clearly dumb enough." "sayth whath" - said thor Well Yes and No. This is what I found: So by default the RTE wraps texts in a <p> tag =  TRUE.  BUT the catch is you will need to hit a enter or copy paste multiple paragraph. Then the RTE will clean the HTML and in the process it will wrap each para in a <p> tag. NICE. Of course there's a setting for it that you can modify and instead of <p> you can have <br/> and so. <setting name="HtmlEditor.LineBreak" value="p" /> And no you can't have anything that you want there.. there's a limit...

I usually don't watch the Morning Show on channel 7 unless I am in a waiting room or with my girlfriend, in both cases changing the channel is beyond my reach. This morning I was in the airport waiting for my flight and as usual the morning show was on TV in the waiting room. I came across this weird interesting topic, as the title of the news was "Beauty and a Geek -- Victoria's secret model and codes in spare time". Similar subheadings kept rolling in at the bottom of the screen as the interview went on. I will quote few of those "part time coder", "she codes in her spare time", "beauty with brain ( well this one wasn't a heading but something similar that the reporter said )". Seriously WTF !! Is it only me or everyone can spot why I am ranting about this ? I will point it out just in case: 1. Using words/terms like "coder".. is so wrong . This is 2014 .. Seriously who says words like that? And I'm unaware...

Caution: The title might be somewhat misleading but kind of relevant. For the next few para I’m going to rant about drupal. (so all the drupal lovers please dont read beyond this point. Also this is my personal biased POV. I don’t gain or loose anything for or against drupal). Being said that : Here it goes: Do I like Drupal:  Hell No (so far) Why ? 1.  It’s shit. I think it’s an abomination of anything called CMS.  2.  It’s a VB (visula basic) in PHP. And as a developer I’ve never liked visual basic. And drupal is similar in extra that it is in PHP. So yes .. figure the rest out. 3.  It works well for the people who think “installing/upgrading their mobile OS makes them like developers hence Mr. KnowItAll.”. Guess what ? it doesn’t and that’s not what developers do. So, you installed few modules in drupal and made it work for the purpose - this doesnt qualify you as a developer nor makes drupal *really easy and nice CMS*. Eventually this *install ...