Design vs Art Blog

I think I am lucky for having an annual public transport ticket for the Munich area (Bavaria, Germany). For me it was easy, I went to the city transport company office (MVG, Münchner Verkehrsgesellschaft mbH) and I told the friendly lady the most obvious thing I could: I live here, and I work there, I would like an annual ticket for that. Simple.

Unfortunately, MVG took a completely different approach while designing its ticket machines. Just as you can imagine it in your worst nightmares, the machine is full of numbers, zones, buttons, a small screen, etc., etc…

Lets have a closer look…
Imagine that you have the bad-luck of having to buy a ticket with this machine, where would you look at first? The screen is too far from the buttons and there are two different groups of buttons labeled with numbers (numbers 1 to 4 appear twice). It’s nice that you can select 6 different languages, but zone information and almost all button labels are only in German.

Here you have 28 buttons! You get them in orange, blue, yellow, red, green, with and without stripes. They did one good thing putting a sticker indicating the buttons to buy tickets for tourist, good point.

This is the most crazy part of this devilish machine, checking which zone ticket you should buy could be a whole mission. Please don’t ask me to tell you how this works, nobody knows.

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Solution
Why don’t we reduce all this mess to the most simple and obvious solution? The machine should know where is located, so the only thing to do would be to push the destination station on the map! I want to go form here to there, that’s it!

I have to say that I totally love the Munich public transport, it’s just fantastic, but the price system and the ticket machines are horrible. There is something to improve there…

Popularity: 18% [?]

I got to Joomla when I was trying to find a way of having my personal web page updated all the time. I knew about several Content Management Systems (CMS) but I didn’t want to pay a license, you know, it’s for my personal web page, not a commercial site. A CMS is a software system used for content management, including text files, image, audio and all kinds of web content. You can use a CMS for several proposes, like in-company documentation, file sharing and as a wiki.

I was interested in publishing my personal information and keeping it updated easily, so I decided to install Joomla! on my server and give it a try. Joomla! is an open source project and it can be downloaded and installed for free. You can additionally download several extensions and templates for your site.

The installation
Installing the software on my server was extremely easy, no problem at all. Just put the file on my server and called the installation file from the web browser.

Using it
Well, it could take you some time until you get used to it. I have installed the last version, the 1.5, which has an extremely limited documentation - almost nothing -. Here is my biggest complaint about this project, I understand that Joomla! is a free software but if you don’t give the users a proper manual to give the software a try they might get confused and frustrated before they discover the great features this system has.

Customizing
I downloaded a nice template, then I installed and modified it. It was easy to install it but a little bit too messy to modified it. Basically, some things can be changed through the administrator’s interface and others directly on the code.

Finally…
At the end I got what I wanted, a good looking online CV that can be updated from every computer. You can check it here: www.alexisbrion.eu

I totally recommend this CMS. Remember that Joomla! is an open source project and needs support to survive, on money or helping with the project. Have a check, install it, play with it: www.joomla.org

Popularity: 14% [?]