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Sunshine Documentation

The Sunshine Joomla template was released in August 2007.

The following steps will help you to work better with the Sunshine template. Please follow the instructions and use this item as a guide for setting up your site and configuring the various options found in the template as well as the extensions and scripts that are showcased on the Sunshine demo site.

preview

feature Overview

download

Getting Started

Choosing between the template or the quickstart.

Installing the template.

Choose this option if you already have your site created or have at least made changes to the default Joomla installation and want to overlay this theme onto your site. For a complete installation of the demo site on your server please refer to installing the quickstart package.

Installing the template is achieved using the same method as installing any other template or extension.

Navigate to your Joomla admin area at yoursite.com/administrator

Navigate to Extensions > Install/uninstall

Click browse and locate the template zip on your harddrive.

Click upload and install.

After you receive the success message, navigate to Extensions > Template Manager

Select the radio checkbox next to the name of the template that you have just installed and then click on the button at the top right of the screen that says default.

Now if you navigate to the front page of your site and you should see the Canvas template installed into your Joomla site.

Installing the quickstart.

The Joomlabamboo quickstart packages are complete replicas of the particular template's demo site. They are basically the same as the Joomla installation zip except they come with the template, watermarked images and extensions you see on the demo site. They are a quick and easy way to have your site setup and ready to edit.

You can read the tutorial on installing the quickstart packages here.

Configuring the Template

You are able to update the template colour variation in the Template Manager.

If you take the time to look at the directory structure of the template folder you'll notice that the background and slider css are all stored in the styles directory. If you want to change any of the colours in the css just navigate to the scheme you want to change and you can edit away.

Layout and module positions

Sunshine might look a little thin on first impression but there is some might flex hidden within this template. There are a total of 18 different module positions available and most of the collapse. The key feature is obviously the 6 sliding divs and they are able to be published or unpublished at the click of a button. Click on the drop down items on the layout tab to see this template flex.

The image below doesnt actually show you the modules underneath the sliders but they are in top to bottom order: advert1, advert2, advert3, user4, user5 and user6.

Sunshinemodulepositions

Menus

Superfish menu

1. Install Extended Menu module v1.06 for use on Joomla 1.5.

2. Install the module by using the Joomla module installer.

3. Publish the module to the module position called menu or in older templates to the top position.

4. Disable the module title.

5. Select the menu you want to use.

6. Select flat list as the menu type.

7. Set expand menu to yes.

8. Set use menu template to yes.

9. Set the menu path to superfish/menu.html if its not already set.

Here are some screenshots of the admin panel so you can see exactly the way we have created the drop down effect.

Superfish Menu

Split Menu

A split menu means that you can position the sub menu items for a particular menu and place it in a different module altogether. Once again this is done using the Extended Menu module.

From the extended menu website:

A common "solution" using the built in mainmenu was to create individual menus (for the top menu, and each of the child menus) and then display/hide the child menus by selecting the pages (menu items) it should be displayed on. This can easily get a maintenance nightmare.

Instead you may want to define a single menu with the top menu items and the child menu items being a child of the appropriate top menu item (use the built in Menu Manager, please refer to the Joomla documentation if you are not sure how to use it). This is necessary to have them logically linked together. You then use two instances of the Extended Menu module to display the top menu part and the side navigation.

Assuming you have the default parameters set, this is what you need to set for each module instance.

First module instance (top menu):

Parameter Name	Value
Split Menu	1
Menu Count	1
Begin With Level	0

And for the second module instance (side navigation)

Parameter Name	Value
Begin With Level	1

In the Sunshine template you can assign the secondary menu to the top position and have it appear directly underneath the top menu; or at the user 9 position underneath the sliding divs at the top; or as a vertical menu in the left column or right column using the module class suffix -menu.

Other Menu Style Options:

Module Class suffix -menu.

Module Class suffix -modernbrick.

Module Class suffix -solidblockmenu.

Modern Brick

working with the sliding Panels

The Sunshine template comes loaded with 6 sliding divs/panels to help you save on some screen real estate. Just publish modules to advert 1, advert 2 and advert 3 for the top three modules or user4, user5 and user6 for the bottom three.