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This theme is classic bamboo. It features a delicate mix of clean lines, white space and subtle grungy textures. It's a responsive Joomla template built for a variety of uses.

FeaturesDownload Live Preview

A new Zen Grid Framework version ...

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The template is built on v2.4.0 of the Zen Grid Framework which contains a stack of new features and optimisations. At the moment the other templates have not been updated to use this version of the framework so please only install 2.4 on sites using the Ecospirit template. All v2 themes (Except for Shop Ignition will be updated later today and tomorrow.)

The focus for this version has been around improved performance and so there have been a number of code optimisations that affect the front and the back end.

I've written a detailed list of what's in v2.4 and will flesh that out some more when I release the changelog after all of the other themes have been updated.

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Ascent is our October Joomla template release and the latest in our range of responsive Joomla templates.

It is a business oriented Joomla template that features a clean design which combines subtle background textures, elegant drop shadows and gradients with some eye popping colour combinations.

Some crucial links before we get into some of the detail

Ascent Features | Preview | Documentation | Download | Zenkit K2 Demo

Another responsive Joomla template to add to the mix ...

ascent-responsive

Ascent is our sixteenth responsive Joomla template and in all honesty probably one of the most enjoyable designs that I've coded in recent history. I think one of the reasons for this is that it's the first theme developed on one of the new Zen Building block starter templates.

If you missed the announcement last month about the building blocks they are basically a collection of Joomla template skeletons that are ideal precursors to commonly used patterns in web design and can really help to speed up the development time on Joomla projects.

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A few weeks ago we released the Zen Building Block templates and to compliment that set of starter Joomla templates I am releasing the Responsive Jomsocial template.

This theme for Jomsocial is much like our original Responsive template we built back in October last year. It's a no frills vanilla starter skeleton designed for Jomsocial developers to dig in to and get their hands dirty. The theme has a limited amount of styling so it will fit perfectly in to any Joomla template and it will scale to fit the limitations of your design - responsive or not.

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[I'm often surprised by how popular our simpler and more minimal Joomla templates are. Along with themes like corporate, lifestyle and the recent Highline I often see less complex themes like simpleshop, zen default and rasa featuring at the top of our download stats.

So this month rather than bringing you a single template release, we would like to introduce Zen Building Blocks. The Zen Building Blocks are a set of five responsive Joomla templates that are designed to be ideal starting points for your Joomla web projects.

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Responsive Jomsocial Template

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I have wanted to create a Jomsocial template for such a long time that I feel like I have just ticked something off my bucket list. I'd be surprised if you didn't already know about Jomsocial but for those that don't - Jomsocial is the premier social networking extension for Joomla.

Building the demo site for the Highline Jomsocial Template was the first chance I've had to play with Jomsocial (at least for an extended amount of time) and I have to say that this is a really solid piece of software. While I recognise that not everyone needs a social app on their website, I can certainly see why this is the chosen extension among Joomla web site builders for creating social or community driven websites.

Did I mention it's responsive ...

JomsocialTease

The key point for the Highline Jomsocial template is that in keeping with all of our Joomla template releases since September last year - it is responsive. This means that with the help of the Highline template, the Jomsocial component will morph and scale according to the width of your users browser. This essentially means that within this one joomla template you get an elegant, minimal Jomsocial template that will work across any browser - large or small.

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Two new Zenkit demo sites

Way back in April we released Zenkit - a collection of responsive K2 templates and I've just taken the covers off two new demo sites that showcase what you can do with Zenkit.

If you missed the announcement, Zenkit is a small set of stand alone K2 templates that can be dropped into any Joomla template.

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And now we return you to your normally schedule program ...

The Intrepid Joomla template is our first template release in the last two months.

I explained in this blog some of the reasons why we had fallen behind schedule and despite my best efforts, my estimate regarding Intrepid's release date proved to be a little optimistic.

So in an effort to draw the proverbial line in the sand that I spoke so valiantly about, Intrepid is now our July template release and all members have been given an extra two months to compensate for skipping the previous two months.

With this revised schedule we will have the August template release available in the first week of August and thus we will be back on track to release all future templates within the first week of the month.

And so what about Intrepid?

Well I'm glad you asked ... Intrepid is the latest of our responsive Joomla templates that has a tonne of intelligent browser scaling and switching that will make your clients love you and keep you fixated on resizing your browser when developing your site.

The Intrepid Joomla template is a stylish mix of business, blog, news portal and gallery rolled into one with all of the power and flexibility of our Zen Grid Framework, Zentools and Zenkit power tools.

View the demo | Read the documentation | Download.

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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.

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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.

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If you missed it yesterday (well you just have to look at the post below this one) we released a new product line that we are extremely excited about. The Zenkit templates are stand alone template for K2 designed to fit into any Joomla template that add some very nifty layout options for your K2 content.

You can see the announcement in this post, view the live demo and now read the documentation that will guide you through working with these new templates.

A lite version is coming.

Zenkit templates are currently only available to club members however in the next few days to a week we will be releasing a lite version that we will make available for free to non club members.

Layout suggestions.

The Zenkit layouts cover most of the layouts available with our Zentools module with the exception of a carousel. We have plans to add a carousel layout in the next major version.

In the meantime what are the types of layouts that you would like to see added to the Zenkit templates? We are certainly open to building on the layouts available and your suggestions are more than welcome.

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Since the release of the Avanti Joomla template way back in January 2010, we have packaged an individually styled k2 template for each template released. In most cases re-using those k2 templates in other templates was a tricky process and success varied depending on your ability to read code. Zenkit is set to change all of that by providing a selection of standalone k2 templates that can be used in any Joomla template and easily transferred between templates.

Some crucial links ...

Preview Download Documentation



A collection of responsive K2 templates ...

The Zenkit templates make it easy to create complex and interesting layouts from your existing K2 content using the core K2 functionality. Using the Zenkit templates means that there is no longer any need to resort to using modules in your content when you really could just use a K2 category layout.

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