11th Feburary, 2016, wisdom from the past week (In this case, in the past month)

I am an aspiring web designer, web developer and photographer. Building up a plethora of tools is not easy. I am hoping to record down the bits and pieces of wisdom I have learnt during my journey. Hopefully, it can help someone out.

• (I really hoped I did not have to start with this one.) You cannot spell therapist without rapist.
• In JQuery, one can apply $() selector to select multiple levels of children, but .children() selector only affects a single level. - Corollary: in order to select an element with a specific set of classes (e.g. <div class="pickme imtherealone"></div><div class="pickme"></div>
  ), remove the spaces (e.g. use $('.pickme.imtherealone')
• bootstrap looks easy and useful - I have since went through bootstrap and put it to some good use. Still need more practice
• When customising the a module in Joomla in css, always use element.classname or element.id. For example, the ul element is typically used for menu’s. (This should have been in HTML/CSS 101. But still made the mistake.)
• box-sizing:border-box is an amazing way to define div sizes.
• In JS or JQuery, always quotation marks for properties. For example, use .css('border-width','24px') rather than .css(border-width,24px). Again, this should have been HTML/JS 101. - One exception to this rule is if the value is a number, say variable = 1024, then one need not quote the number. Otherwise, it will be considered as a string. (More rant on JS treatment of variables later)
• In order to modify any of the modules, first create an override of the corresponding module (Extension ->Templates …

Click on the template you are using …

Then click “Create Override” and find the module or component or layout you want to override…

• To find out which component (NOT modules… modules should be self-explanatory) you need to override, go to manage menu

and find the page you want to modify, and check the path underneath it

In this case, in order to customise the page after clicking “blog” button from the main menu, I will need to find the component folder called com_articles, and create an override for the item Category Blog.

• Override creates a file that you can play with, and change the behaviour of the final page. To access the file, which you can tinker with, go to Extension -> Template -> select your template (as before), Then, hit Editor -> html -> find the component/module you are interested in tinkering.