BAD design descisions! Hope JA will better themselves here!

tom_laan84

Hi,

I've been using this template on two of my client's site and i must say i'm not impressed by the bad coding standards JA has done on this template. It makes for this template to be hard to customize when it doesn't have to be this way.

HTML 5 Lightbox free version WTF!?!?!?
WOW this a big screw-up in my book.... Having a library loaded for just one popup? What could've been done by Bootstrap modals just fine! And also it has F@& advertising in the popup? Are you kidding me? That advertising in the popup makes it totally useless!!! Who thought that would be a good idea?

SVG Bullets
For instance the SVG Bullets in the template are hard coded in the template! Please NEVER ever do that again. This kind of things can also be done with css which is way more easier to override. And if you do this? Then add a switch to turn it on or off. Would've been a simple setting in the JA ACM module for instance. Now i have turned the website into green and those bullets stay red because they are hard coded! How did that get through quality control?

Hard coded font-awesome 4 versions and 3 font icon libraries???
You supply the template with 3 different font-icon libraries in the template. Why in gods name is that good for? You could suffice with just Font-Awesome 5. Especially having FA4 and FA5 in it seems crazy to me. And if you want to get rid of the legacy FA4 and only use FA5 icons break in JA Masthead, Contacts page and so on... Would need to create overrides for all of those to fix the issues. There must be a better way to deal with this!

Hard coded styling in e.g.: JA ACM hero
And another problem i faced was for instance the JA ACM Hero in section 7 in homepage having bg-primary hard coded in the style-2.php file instead of using the color pallette options the template comes with which could've been assigned to the section 7 to do the same! But that is overrideable in a much easier way. Now i have to create my own overide of style-2 in acm hero override folder. Instead of just changing a pallette in the template settings. Or if that is not a good solutions, even an option in JA ACM to swith between the different bg-colors would be fine. Or a switch to turn background off.

I've seen more and more hard-coded stuff like this in your templates in recent years. What is up with that? Can we please do something about these bad coding habits? Templates are made to be overriden and T4 has a very powerful override system. So it would be nice of in the future you could make more use of it. And think about any hard coded thing if it could be variable instead of hard coded.

As a long-time Developer member (13 years!) i hope you take my feedback to heart and really do something with this. It will only make JA better product if we could stay away from these bad habits.

Kind regards,

Tom van der Laan
TLWebdesign.nl

Manit

Hi tom_laan84
We really appriciate your very positive feedback, it does help us on understanding how useful our products for users. We surely will improve our products. Recently, we released a major update version for T4 Framework to improve the color theme setting, thanks to the feedback from our great users.
I will work with our developer team to update the JA Alpha template as well as the T4 Framework.
1. Popup: yes, Bootstrap modal would be good enough in this case. There will be an update for this.
2. SVG Bullets: we will check and find a better solution for this. I am thinking of a setting in ACM module and it should be an image so it will be easier for anyone to update.
3. Font icons: In the template setting > Add-ons tab, you can enable or disable the font icons. For the reported issue that the FA5 icon break in JA Masthead, contacts, we will check again and that is an issue, it will be fixed for sure.
4. ACM Hero: we will remove the hard coded bg-primary from the .php file and will use module class suffix that can apply bootstrap brand color like bg-primary, bg-success and more.

If you have more comments, we are more than happy to disucss and find out the best solution to improve our products.
We know a product is a product that is usable and easy to set up and are willing to update and change.

Thank you again for your productive feedback.
Manh Nguyen.
Lead of JoomlArt.

tom_laan84

Hi Manh,

Thanks for your kind response and it's good to see there will be action taken and these things will be improved. Excellent as always! Thanks

Kind regards,

Tom van der Laan

Manit

Hi tom_laan84
I would like to update you that JA Alpha has been released with improvements as you suggested. We thank you for your very productive comments and reviews.
Feel free to check and let me know if you have any further suggestions 🙂
Have a nice weekend and stay safe.

Regards.
Manh, JoomlArt Lead.