We have just locked in the design for the August Joomla template and this time its a soft, subtle textured, all natural, eco friendly Joomla template. The design comes courtesy of David Vuu (Avanti, Pixel Eight and Newstream fame) and I think he is done another amazing job. We are still playing with the name and Ill fill you in on more details a little further down the track but for now you can get a taste of what we will be releasing in August.

Check the screenshot after the jump.

Ive just rolled out the next major update of our Joomla template framework - the Zen Grid Framework. Version 1.05 is a reasonably major release and it adds a lot of functionality to the core framework. Check out the feature list below or if you cant wait - make sure you read through the changelog for your respective template in the changelog post of your template's forum.

The big news is that the framework now supports Google Fonts - as you saw in the recent release of the Newstream template. This feature adds an extra layer to the visual aesthetic of your site and gives you the option to use google fonts for your logo, headings, body text or navigation elements. We will be updating the docs later today so be sure to check out the options available there in the next day or so.

I'm happy to announce that the Newstream Joomla  template is now available for all of our club members.  New stream is a simple news portal or Magazine template with a bold color hierarchy that is perfect for creating an elegant Joomla magazine or Joomla news site. It has a wonderful K2 template that is perfect for ;multi-user blogs or magazine type layouts.

 The template is a little late in delivery but we had to delay this release in order to make it compatible with the latest version of the Zen Grid framework. Version 1.05 of the framework  includes a  few new tasty features such as support for Google fonts, better implementation of the logo or the option to use Google font replacement for the logo as well as a handful of other smaller layout tweaks and refinements. I'll be spending the rest of today porting the existing templates to the new framework and will put together a special announcement regarding the release of the new version of the framework.

For now you can see the Newstream template  in action on the demo site, or read about its features on the feature overview page or check out the indepth documentation on the doc page.

Development on Newstream, our Joomla template release for July, is coming along nicely and tomorrow I'm planning on cracking open a fresh installation of K2 v2.3 to put it through its paces. I thought since the sub pages are starting to come together so nicely Id give you a snapshot of the simplicity that you should expect from the template.

The emphasis of this template is really on creating a clean and simple layout for you to use to highlight your content - mixing strong typography with lots of white space ... Anyway you can check the screen grab after the break.

Ive just finalised the Joomla template design for July and its another gem from the Melbourne designer David Vuu. I think he has captured the bamboo aesthetic  perfectly and delivered an amazingly simple but powerful news portal / magazine style theme with some thoughtful colour hierachies and interesting styling for the Slideshow3 module. 

You can check out a full screenshot of the new template after the break.

Im happy to announce that the March Joomla Template release - Pixel Eight - is now Zen Grid Compatible. It was the last of the 2010 templates to make the leap and even though it was the last of the non framework themes to be released I wanted to wait a while before we ported it to the new template ramework. The port ended up being relatively painless and so its onwards and backwards through the rest of the catalogue now.

The process of upgrading non-zen or pre-framework templates is really pretty easy (in most cases) and we hope to have some tutorials coming soon to help you through that process if you need a design before it gets ported or if you feel like porting a live site to the new framework.

In the meantime club members can download the new version from our download area and take the new version for a spin.

Im happy to announce the release of our June 2010 Joomla template. The original Grid proved to be one our most popular Joomla themes and Im hoping that Grid2 is a worthy successor.

Grid2 is built on the Zen Grid Framework and also comes bundled with a K2 template for use with the K2 cck component from joomlaworks.

A few of you have been asking for more previews of the Grid2 Joomla template whose release is quite imminent, so I thought Id post a screenshot of the K2 Blog template that we are shipping with Grid2. Once again its a pretty simple blog type layout and the screenshot is using the minimal theme called white squares.