As you may have noticed fromy my Dribbble stream I have been toying with a few ideas for a redesign of the Joomlabamboo site.

I have wanted to overhaul the pricing table for some time and make it, firstly more useful and secondly a lot lighter and I hit upon an idea today that I think achieves that. The table also includes some tooltips for some of the key elements in the pricing grid which I hope will provide a better idea of the benefits of each plan.

You can see it in action on our sign up page.

A new plan ... The Big Bamboo 

The Big Bamboo Lifetime developer plan is an exciting addition to our list of subscriptions.

We cater to all types of users here at Joomlabamboo and this plan is aimed at busy developer types who love what we do and want to keep using our products .... for .... ever .... (cue space echo effect or manic laughter). 

A small note to let you know that it is now possible to use 2Checkout and Paypal as payment processors when purchasing a subscription for our Joomla Templates.

Why did we do this?

In general we like the way paypal works (despite the horrendous UX in their admin area) however there are occasional hiccups in their system that are inconvenient for us and of course inconvenient to you. We figure adding the option of using 2Checkout as a payment processor will help to ease any of the pain that these occasional problems with Paypal may present.

2Checkout also accepts payments from users in more countries than Paypal and they also have a better vetting system against fraud. 

New Buttons

As a side note the nifty new buttons are taken from the css button tutorial over here.

Because of the way that AEC (our subscription component) handles the add to cart buttons when there are multiple processors available we had to mock the buttons up in css first and then grab a screenshot and turn it into an image.

This was the first time I have gone from using css to a graphic in web design - normally it's the other way around.

It feels a little cheesey making this announcement but I'm pretty wrapped to have hit such a momentus number of messages posted on our support forum. To celebrate hitting the milestone I have just given the lucky subscriber who posted the 50,000th message. So congrats to Jonathanne who just picked up an extra 12 months on his subscription.

A big thanks to Seth, Paul, Jason and Ed who have helped with their sterling support efforts to reach that number too, plus of course all of our members who have helped put together such a great community of Joomla developers and users.

Also I will be drawing the winners of the site of the year and avatar competition on Monday now so there is still time to enter the competition if you haven't submitted your design or your avatar.

It has been sometime since I last redesigned the Joomlabamboo site and for at least the last six months I've been itching to get in and do it again. Back in December I deployed the new template for our knowledgebase area and while I have some grand plans for a complete revisioning of the whole JB site I thought I would spend an hour or two and push the knowledge base template onto the blog and give it a tiny twist.

In the past I've really wanted to keep each area of the site within a uniform design but more and more I'm noticing companies that have a completely new design for the various areas of their site. I think if it's done well then it can make for quite an eclectic experience for the user and really help to personalise the different focusses that a site may have.

One of the side projects I've been working on for the last six weeks or so is a little redesign of the Joomlabamboo site as well as a new documentation or knowledge base for our Joomla templates and Joomla extensions. I've just taken another swing through the knowledgebase and although there is still a little way to go, it's progressing quite nicely. I'm hoping that we may launch early in the new year even if it's just a soft launch while we iron out the kinks and take feedback on usability etc.

Midway through last month I posted about the change in our pricing structure and the date for the changeover is rapidly approaching. On the 15th January we will be introducing the new pricing structure which will see the introduction of a two tiered system with incentives for renewing members. So if you are a new member and are looking to join the club then joining now is a quick way to save a bit of cash before we hit the new fee structure.

After a few months of testing and sending our new snapshot system into the wild, Im happy to announce that from the January release on (due for release in the next day or so) we will be releasing templates with Snapshots only. We wont be releasing a quickstart package for the Avanti template or any future releases and as we develop the snapshots for our prior template releases we will be phasing out the quickstart packages all together.

You can read all about the thinking behind the snapshots here or get an overview of how they work on the template snapshot page.

In a nutshell the snapshots significantly reduce our maintenance time for new and old releases in terms of updating Joomla or any of the Joomal extensions that we use in the release packages. We will also be able to offer a much wider variety starter sample content, so rather than installing the quickstart and removing the demo content the hope is that you will install the quickstart and just start writing.

Ill be posting here when we release new sample data systems but for the time being stay tuned for the release of Avanti.

In the tradition of end of year wrap ups I asked the JB team to put together some of the highlights for their work and personal life in 2009. While I asked everyone to contribute Jeremy, Barabara and myself were the only ones to actually put some fingers to keyboard; Jason was too busy snorkelling in crystal blue waters off the Australian east coast, Seth was too busy having an extended christmas/birthday, Ed was still eating christmas turkey and Rikard got lost in the Norwegian snow :)

We have just published our request for premium support services form. This is a new service that was created as a result of the many requests we get on the Joomlabamboo forum for help with Joomla or help customising our templates and extensions. The service is aimed at providing joomla help for small tasks that are a little out of your depth but don't require the input of a full time developer. As a guide we imagine that most tasks will fall into the one to four hour category of time spent by our developers.

Some examples of what we can help you with under this level of support include:

Customisation of a template: Logo, colour change or slight layout change.

Setting up third party extensions: Sh404, Community Builder, Jomsocial, Juga, AEC etc

Basic Joomla Help: Setting up and troubleshooting core Jooma features.

General Help: Any help with Joomla, design or coding that you need a little nudge with.

One of the things I'm really happy about with our recent relaunch is that we are now able to take advantage of the latest stable version of the AEC subscription component. The AEC component has a whole stack of new features and some really powerful micro integrations that make integrating subscriptions into third-party components and other software platforms relatively easy.

But one of the features that I really like is the ability for the user to print an invoice has been processed by the system. This means that you have complete access to your records and you were able to get a personalized account of what you have spent throughout the life of your membership.