Wow, I feel like my head is going to explode! I am working on a very big project, automating the connection between buyers and sellers in a large but well defined particular niche, and it’s not just a sole proprietor kind of operation. This needs extensive interaction with both customer bases, big advertisers, and extensive data tracking.

I had at first proposed WordPress or WordPressμ (μ=mu=multi-user) and that might actually become part of this project, but I quickly realized it was bigger than that. Don’t get me wrong. I really like WordPress. It started out as a little blog software that grew into a very nice CMS – Content Management System. But I started thinking this project needed something different, something as big as a major news outlet would use, with many sections, each a web-site and a half in itself.

I’m a big fan of Open Source, so I started looking seriously at Joomla. I had dabbled in it a year ago, but didn’t have a project big enough to fully explore it. So wow, now I’m heavy into it. It is NOT like WordPress at all. You have to define things before you can define things before you define things, and the documentation hasn’t really caught up with it. You have Components, Modules, Plugins, and Extensions, that are arranged in a flip-over hierarchy. Sometimes things outrank other things, and sometimes it’s reversed. And Categories & Sections are not the same. And God forbid you should write an article before a Category is defined for it. God forbid you define a Category before a Section is defined for it. God forbid you want to build a Menu before all your Sections and Categories are built. God double-forbid you want to enter content anywhere before your web site is finished!

Well, I am finally getting the hang of it, but Joomla has a pretty ultra basic Registration form, and a pretty basic Contact form, and God hang you for thinking a Registered user is a Contact! So of course, we need to go trolling for expanding Extensions to collect all this data.

Which brings me to what to do with this data??

Ha! Well, I’ve told you previously about SugarCRM. CRM=Customer Relationship Management. You need that for big projects. But I didn’t want to have Joomla collecting Registration/Contact data for me to manually import or type into another database every day! So I went looking for an automated method to collect all the data we needed, and stuff it in a CRM, and I found these people, OpenWebApps, who wax quite elequent about vTiger, an Open Source competitor for SugarCRM, and who very kindly provide another extension for collecting unlimited fields on your contact form, er um, registration form, in Joomla, and importing them into vTiger. Wow, that’s exactly what I need.

So I’ve gone through the process of installing Joomla (configuring it will be an ever ongoing process), and I’ve gone through the process of installing vTiger, both on my client’s preferred hosting service, and every hosting service has its quirks. But I got them both working fine now. And both have nearly empty databases.

NOW the job will be getting them to handshake, and it is at this point that I stop and fix some dinner, because my head is going to explode! But don’t worrry. I’ll rest a bit and come back to it. I love a good challenge!

This afternoon I had the occasion to sit with a client who had a particular “sexy” domain name in mind: Secret<redacted>.com . She had been watching it for about 4 weeks – several times bringing up GoDaddy’s front page to reassure herself it was still available. She already owned two other domain names, so she knew what she was doing, already had a GoDaddy account, and knew how to buy a domain name.

With the intent that we were going to start her WordPress web site today, she brought up GoDaddy and I watched her again find her chosen available domain name and put it in her shopping cart. GoDaddy, a pretty slow web site under the best of circumstances, overburdened with its flashy shell game of menues, ground her older laptop to a halt.

We figured while we were waiting for her laptop to find it’s way out of the morrasse, we’d hop onto my newer netbook, and she could buy her hosting where we had planned to do, and then we’d come back to the GoDaddy screen and complete her domain purchase.

I didn’t see whether it crashed and she rebooted, or whether she simply closed the browser and started over, counting on her shopping cart cookie to carry her forward (GoDaddy cookies are very quick to maintain products in MY shopping cart, I’ll tellya), but we found ourselves starting over with an empty shopping cart.

So she entered it again in the prominant domain search box.

What? What??? WHAT???? It was now labelled a “Premium Domain” which GoDaddy would gladly sell us for $1,788 bucks!!

Something was very, very, wrong. And I was LIVID. I AM livid.

I immediately did a whois on it, and got these results:

Domain Name: SECRET<redacted>.COM

Created: 2004-08-17

Expires: 2010-08-17

Nameservers:

THIS-DOMAIN-FOR-SALE.COM

NS.BUYDOMAINS.COM

Registrant:

RN WebReg

RareNames, Inc.

738 Main Street, #389

Waltham, MA 02451

Administrative Contact:

RN WebReg

RareNames, Inc.

738 Main Street, #389

Waltham, MA 02451

Voice: +1.781 839 7993

Fax: +1.781 839 2801

E-mail: brokerage@buydomains.com

Technical Contact:

RN WebReg

RareNames, Inc.

738 Main Street, #389

Waltham, MA 02451

Voice: +1.781 839 7993

E-mail: brokerage@buydomains.com

Billing Contact:

RN WebReg

RareNames, Inc.

738 Main Street, #389

Waltham, MA 02451

Voice: +1.781 839 7993

E-mail: brokerage@buydomains.com

Hmmmm… So it says somebody has owned this domian since exactly 5 years and 10 days prior to us trying buy it, but it supposedly was a pristine domain from GoDaddy.

Well, I wasn’t born yesterday. I know a stinking rat when I smell one, and I called GoDaddy. To the best of my ability to reconstruct it, this was the conversation:

GoDaddy Support: Hello, this is Steve. How can I help you?

Myself: Hi, I’m helping a friend with her web site, and we just tried to buy a domain name from GoDaddy, and saw a really weird thing happen. It was available, we both saw it, and we put it in the shopping cart. Then her browser crashed and we had to start over, and when we searched on it again, it came up as a “Premium Domain” for $1,788. We know it had been available, we both saw it, but a whois on it now shows that somebody has owned it for over 4 years.

GoDaddy Support: What was the domain?

Myself: Secret<redacted>.com

GoDaddy Support: Yes, that domain has been owned for over 4 years.

Myself: Then why did it come up as available on GoDaddy’s front page?

GoDaddy Support: I can assure you that domain has been owned for over 4 years.

Myself: Yes, I know what the database says. I pulled up a whois on it myself. So apparently GoDaddy’s database was wrong, because it told us it was available when it wasn’t. Or, GoDaddy’s database was correct, and the date on the whois database is wrong, and when we left our shopping cart, something tipped somebody off and it was really just bought 5 minutes ago, and somebody changed the date on it.

GoDaddy Support: That’s not possible, that would have to have been be some kind of hacker to tamper with a government database.

Myself: Yeah, so? It happens. I’ve even known some pretty smart hackers in my time. Stuff like this happens. So I’m telling you something is very wrong. Either the whois database is wrong, or the GoDaddy front page was wrong in telling us it was available. The both of us here saw it happen right before our eyes.

(My friend asked to speak on the phone.)

My friend: Hello, yes, I’ve been looking at Secret<redacted>.com on your GoDaddy front page for 4 weeks now, and it always told me it was available. Only today after we tried to buy it, crashed, and tried again to buy it, did it came up as a premium domain, and wanted $1,788 for it. It’s not that I even wanted that domain name that badly. It just really bothers me that somebody would be so underhanded.

(I could no longer hear what GoDaddy Support was saying. A couple of minutes later, she gave me back the phone.)

Myself: Well, I know that there’s nothing that you or we can do about it now. That guy owns it now. But there is something really wrong, and you really need to fill out a problem report, because there are only two possible scenarios – Either he has owned it for over 4 years, in which case GoDaddy’s database is telling people domain names are available when they’re not. Or he has owned it only a few minutes, in which case he somehow was connected into GoDaddy and quickly keyed in on an “abandoned” GoDaddy shopping cart, then hacked the date in the government database to hide his tracks. So my friend and I can’t prove a damn thing, other than that there are now two eye-witnesses to what happened. It is one of those two scenarios. You might have somebody crooked on the inside helping him. You need to write a problem report.

GoDaddy Support: Well, if we saw a lot of this kind of thing, it would be a problem, but we generally don’t get these kinds of complaints.

Myself: There is still something very wrong. It doesn’t matter if you don’t see a lot of this kind of thing. Most people wouldn’t call you and tell you. The GoDaddy site is so slow, a lot of people would totally give up and wouldn’t even bother calling you. Or they might blame themselves. Or they wouldn’t realize how really wrong this kind of thing is, or if they did they wouldn’t bother calling you to tell you you had a problem. But I’m telling you you have a serious problem and need to write a problem report so GoDaddy knows about it, no matter how little you generally see it.

(We said our goodbye pleasantries and hung up.)

By this time, after about a half hour worth of conversation, my friend had come up with a domain name she liked even better, Sacred<redacted>.com. This actually fit the spiritual theme of her planned web site even better, yet was just as “sexy” a domain name as the first one had been.

But for dang sure, WE DIDN’T BUY IT FROM GODADDY.

I have a personal blog I play with at SuzCorner.com, which uses a color-altered version of the WordPress Default Theme (what can I say, I like it ). But a big source of frustration for me has been how the navigation sidebar simply …evaporates… when you go to a single archived article. Why? What possible point does it serve to make the navigation go away? I even spent quite a bit of time modifying the BlueBerry theme (a colorful variation of the Default theme) to the precise color scheme I wanted, only to find that, unlike the author’s own site which happily carried the navigation from page to page, when it came to be applied to my site, the navigation sidebar would just disappear again!! (Please excuse the language, but … WTH???)

A few times in months past, I’ve tried talking to other theme authors about different anomalous behaviours, only to get back a lot of head scratching and pretending to not know what I was talking about. So maybe it wasn’t fair this time, but I didn’t even bother writing to the authors of either Default or BlueBerry. I just started Googling, er, um, Binging “How to add a sidebar to WordPress Default theme”, and found this page.

It’s a pretty nice informative page, and if you scroll way way down, it even gives a mention to adding a sidebar to the single archived pages of a Default themed blog (my case). You just edit the ‘single.php’ file, and stick in a <?php get_sidebar (); ?> statement.

Got that?

No hint, though, about where in the file to put it!! (Nice.)

That part I had to figure out myself, and now I’m telling you — But before adding the new statement to call up the sidebar, you have to make room for it. The content of those single archived pages has been made wide to fill the space the sidebar used to occupy, so you have to make it narrow again.

In the ‘single.php’ file, find the line near the top that says:

<div id=”content” class=”widecolumn”>

Change it to:

<div id=”content” class=”narrowcolumn”>

Now you can scroll all the way down to the bottom, and find the very last line, which says:

<?php get_footer(); ?>

Just before that line, insert the line that says:

<?php get_sidebar (); ?>

So what you end up with in the last two lines of the file ‘single.php’ is:

<?php get_sidebar (); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

Voila!

Why go to all that trouble you say? Well, so your visitors will never get confused! People who run out of things to read and click on on a web site (like navigation) soon leave and take their business elsewhere. And that’s not what you want for your web site, is it?