Theme magic is a non-destructive real time preview tool for your T3 powered website.
Theme Magic makes it possible to create a multitude of theme presets and colour schemes by using a colour wheel or specific HEX values in order to manipulate pre-determined elements within the template.
Design Inspiration - Energy Trust
I was pretty much over parallax even before it started. Don't get me wrong. I think it's smart and impressive but in a lot of respects I think it's unnecessary.
This Energy Trust site however is a great example of parallax / scrolling / whatever you want to call it.
Each slide makes sense and the transitions from left to right are integral to the content of the site. I think this is a great implementation of this style of design but please let this be the last.
The power of under promise
Here’s a Bali tale with a business lesson.
We’re dining at Jimbaran Bay (pictured).
A few metres away, roving musicians Take it to the Limit One More Time for enthusiastic backpackers. Lean dogs edge close to tables, but are driven off by restaurant staff.
Ring tones
Suddenly our table is ringed by blue shirts, white teeth and worn instruments.
This is not our thing. Fonnie has no requests and I’m flummoxed – ten years of DJing gone in a second.
The men wait, while my Bintang brain races for a track. Any track. It’s our ten-year wedding anniversary.
I stare at my wife, hoping to unlock some memory. Finally, a name surfaces and I blurt:
‘Every Breath You Take! By ... um ... by ... ummm ... ahhh ... The Police!’
I look at the faces in triumph, but there’s no flicker of recognition.
Zenbase is a vanilla / skeleton / blank / scaffold (or anything else you want to call it) Joomla 3 Template. It is a free Joomla 3 template that is an ideal starting point for your next project using Joomla 3 and T3.
Features and Download Live Preview
Please note: The Live preview of the Zen base theme features the Zentools module however the free quickstart package does not include this member only extension.
Show us your workspace!
At the end of last year I moved into a new studio space.
For the last five years, Ive been running Bamboo HQ from the front room of my house in Melbourne, on a very busy road, amidst the craziness of living in a house with three young children, a Grandpa with a penchant for loud tv and an exuberant schnautzer.
A move to something more “official” had been on the cards for quite sometime and after close to 6 weeks in the new studio I am absolutely loving it. It certainly begs the question why didn’t I do this before but you know how that goes.
So as a way to celebrate my new found freedom, I have put together a show us your space competition. Just attach an image of your office / workspace in the comments below and you will go in the running to win a 12 month developer subscription - worth $225 AUD.
The winner of the competition will be decided simply by a matter of the most commented workspace by personal bias and whim. So if you like someone’s space - let them know in the space below.
Hip Chat goes native
We moved our core communication platform from Skype to Hip Chat a few months ago and while I wasn't initially that excited about the move the new native app has certainly changed that.
Hip Chat provides a relatively safe place for teams to communicate, without the added distraction of all of your friends knowing that you are online. One of my main bug bears with skype is that it made it difficult to filter out social from work activity, and while I do love to chat with other Joomla folks online, it was becoming more and more problematic in terms of my productivity. Sure I could just ignore or set my status to away but that felt just a little bit rude.
Zentools v1.9 released
Zentools v1.9 is a relatively minor update but i thought it warranted a 0.1 increment. You can get a full rundown of the changes and fixes on the Zentools changelog. If you are new to Zentools - check out what it can do on the Zentools demo site.
No need for JB Library in Joomla 3
This new version no longer requires the JB Library plugin when using it in Joomla 3.0 - so there is one less plugin to install on your site now.
Folks using the module in Joomla 2.5 still need either the framework or the library installed to process images as well as load jQuery.
T3, bootstrap and Joomlabamboo
A few weeks ago we announced our move to using the T3 framework for building our Joomla templates. Since then we have had some great feedback and some great questions from users who are curious to get a little more detail.
Since that time we have also released two new templates, Grid3 and Inspire, and have a number of older templates in various stages of “porting” to T3. So I thought that now would be a good time to dig down into the detail of our workflow with T3 as well as answer some of those questions.
Inspire is a versatile responsive Joomla template that combines dark textured / grungey backgrounds with sharp bevelled lines and an array of elegant typography. It is our second Joomla template compatible with Joomla 3 and built on the T3 template framework.
(If you missed the news about our move to T3 check out the Zen to the power of T3 blog post from a few weeks back.)
A very mega Mega Menu
Inspire is also our first template to feature the incredible T3 mega menu.
The T3 mega menu has an intuitive visual interface that makes building complex menu structures a breeze. You have full control of the width, size, columns, rows and content of each menu item or block of items, which are all controlled via an easy to use visual interface.
Missing an update to Joomla 3.0.3?
Update: This issue has now been fixed and so users who have their update status to the long term release cycle should be notified of the available updates.
Last week when the update to Joomla 3.0.3 was announced, I headed straight to the update manager on my sole live instance of Joomla 3 to test out the new update workflow on a live site.
Unfortunately after I purged the cache and checked for new updates there were no updates to install.
I scratched my head for some time wondering what I had done wrong, checked the version of Joomla 3 I was using, and then I remembered that the Joomla release cycle now has two streams - short term and long term.
The update manager is set to notify users of long term release updates by default and so in order to get notified of these small (and very important security updates) you need to have the update manager set to short term support updates.
Differentiating the two release cycles was done in order to help users avoid the terror of updating from one major version of Joomla eg Joomla 3 to another major version of Joomla eg Joomla 4 - before all of their templates or extensions were ready.
