After a fair amount of wrangling (and delay) v1.3 of the Zentools module is now available.

This is a major update and one that I almost considered releasing as version 2. It comes with some great new features including the ability to apply presets and defaults as well as a new pagination layout.

Members can download Zentools from the Zentools download page.

Introducing Presets and defaults

While Zentools is mostly easy to configure, we have added preset and default options to make it even easier to get up and running. Now it's simply a matter of clicking a few buttons and you can replicate any of the default layouts we showcase on the Zentools demo site.

Yesterday I released a major update of our free Joomla twitter module. jTweet has been in need of a bit of a refresh for quite some time and this release adds a lot of flexibility and a lot of power.  jTweet is built on the brilliant Sea of Clouds Tweet script with a few additions and enhancements.

Drag and Drop templating

If you've used our Zentools module you will know how easy it easy to create your own content layouts using the drag and drop interface; and now that same flexibility is available in the jTweet module. That means you can just drag and rearrange the elements you want to display in your tweet stream which means you have total control over how your twitter stream appears.

We have played with a number of different online project management services over the last few years - Basecamp, Lighthouse, Apollo and Assembla to name a few. Each time we have changed project tools it's signified a maturing of our workflow. From the early days when we just used Basecamp as a collection of todo lists to our current platform Assembla, which integrates our svn, ticket system and bug tracking.

I've been keenly following the progress of the Hot Project task management software for the last few years and while it's functionality in the past hasn't matched our needs, I think all of that is about to change.

The new Hot Project platform features some killer features including a fast user interface (my main gripe with Assembla at the moment), advanced scheduling tools, proforma project creation, document management and more.

So on the eve of the release of Hot Project live I thought I would chat to fellow Melbourne based developer Richard Smallwood to get a bit of insight into what drives Hot Project and where it is headed in what seems like an already crowded marketplace.

In the last week, two of our fellow Joomla template makers have announced that they will be dropping support for Internet Explorer 7 and so after looking at the browser statistics for IE7 use over the last few months I think it has come time to say goodbye to IE7 support.

Just as the folk over at Joomlart have mentioned Google, Facebook, Drupal and even Microsoft have dropped support for IE7 and given that the upgrade path for IE7 is considerably more mature than it was for IE6, we think that IE7's time has come.

Dropping IE7 support means that we will ensure that the page degrades gracefully for IE7 users, but we won't go to great efforts to get it to reflect the same cutting edge performance we are getting out of modern browsers.

This change will come into effect on August 1st.

Typekit support has been a part of our Joomla template framework since v1.0 however I really havent focussed that much on it given the rise and proliferation of google fonts. If you don't know about Typekit, it's a web font provider that has an extensive range of quality fonts available for you to drop into your Joomla template. It's a paid service but it's relatively cheap and really has some fantastic font choices available.

Using quality Google fonts

While google fonts are certainly easy to work with, and are also free, it takes a bit of work to sort the wheat from the chaff, although there are some good blog posts out there offering suggestions for choosing quality Google fonts. (The last link is my favourite) .

So despite the fact that Typekit is a paid service and compiling your own font stack take a little extra work, I think the benefits are obvious when it comes to choosing consistently good quality fonts for your website.

I'm sure there are a number of causes for this but this issue just came up on our support forum so I thought I would post the solution here for anyone else facing the same issue.

The solution itself actually comes from this post on the Joomla forum but it's a little tricky to find it, as it's mixed in with all of the Joomla admin password reset posts etc.

We are looking for a motivated and talented developer to join the Bamboo team.

What you need.

The ideal candidate has been working with Joomla for at least 3 years, has a deep knowledge of PHP and jQuery and lives and breathes html, css and web standards. 

Work in a remote team.

We are a remote team so there is no need to move "down under" but you must be motivated, organised and have an eye for detail.

Scope

Please note that this is a junior part time position with a view to moving full time. 

Make contact.

If you have the skills and want to join us in creating cutting edge Joomla templates please send your contact information, link to your portfolio and relevant work experience via the contact form.

I recently bought my first digital SLR camera and I have to say that I am absolutely loving it.

Photography is a completely new language to me, despite the fact that I have been designing for the web for years now, when I am taking photos I can feel my brain hurt (in a good way). I love the technical challenge, the new terminology and I love the feeling of being a complete novice too.

I've played a tiny bit with Lightroom as you can see. Amazing what happens to a photo when you tweak the colour ever so slightly.To celebrate my beginners luck I'm posting this small collection of free stock photos for you to use, or if you prefer here is the flickr stream.

Feel free to drop them in your web content, royalty free. I hope you like them.

A few days a go I dribbbled some screenshots of our next Joomla template which is due for release in the next few weeks. I really wanted to push a rich, corporate colour pallette on this one as well as play around with some noticeably different responsive layouts.

I've seen some comment that responsive design isn't applicable for complex or intricate layouts. The more I work with responsive design I think that pretty much anything is possible. Of course it helps to have a nice responsive framework to sit underneath the design, but at this point, (and I might be proved wrong at some point) I think that most perceived limitations are self-imposed. 

Checkout the screenshots of the design below and let us know what you think. Not all of the details have been filled in (or finalised) but you can get the picture. Also the logo is just a little placeholder for the time being.

I've just released the Corporate Joomla template which is one of my personal favorite responsive joomla templates to date. It's a clean design that features a background slideshow, some elegant pixelated styling, a whopping 26 colour schemes, support for our brand new Zenkit K2 templates. In addition to this Corporate is available in a our newly realised quickstart packages (see below).

As I mentioned in the post announcing the template, Corporate is a more business savvy version of our popular Lifestyle template that was released back in January of this year. We went a little overboard on this template in terms of Colour schemes and so you can choose from 26 Colour schemes, 18 different button hilites and a selection of useful and colourful module classes.