Hi, I am little bit new in this and need some recommendations regarding most suitable template for Photo Blog/Magazine/Portal template. I can see few template like Gazetta and Portal (Sept13), Novus templates I like so far. Then there is NewsStream2, LifeStyle2 and Rasa2.

I am looking for top menu with one sidebar layout. I like Portal template, but can I have rotating banner on front page rather than static background?
On a sidebar I need features like Tag module (as on front of Portal) with Latest/Popular tags

Then Categories list on right bar as well and Blog Time Filter (to select Article by Month of publications as for the Blog filter)

SideBar need to be visible on all pages with same content, but bottom section should change with Article (some related to page content)

Need also to have one page with Masonry/tiles preview layout and have Tabs navigation with Popular/Featured/latest and other Categories to filter pages

For example Portal have very close layout but I need to have grid/tiles when select Tags/Categories, not one column to scroll. Can I customize that with ZenTools?

Gazetta has good layout, but can I have Menu with different colors and positioned on a banner image, and higher on apage, rather than on top, and also I don't see Tags feature there?

Latest Templates like NewsStream2, LifeStyle2 looks good but don't see Tags module feature and ZenTools has less features compare than Gazetta?

Is it possible to achieve with mentioned templates or I need have Custom made template with this?

Any advice will be appreciated!

Hi Eugene,

Always tricky to recommend a template

As a rule we suggest newer templates as they built on a new faster framework - this is all the templates after newstream2

I would also check out the zentools2 pages
zentools2.joomlabamboo.com/overview
To see what is available using this extension

The tags feature is you describe is part of the portal template but I think there are extensions you could get to duplicate this

Cheers
Paul

Thank you for reply! I completely understand, I think my question now, if I can use Zentolls2 and K2 and Zenkit extensions with above mentioned templates without any issues? I think functionality of that will be enough to built what I am looking for.
Thank you in advance!

You should be able to

Can I just check is their a particular reason you want to use k2?

k2 although good does have a steeper learning curve

Cheers
Paul

I am assuming that with K2 I can use more information with each post/article?
Website its a like Photo blog, so I will post photos with as much information possible fior user get idea about place.

Each post will need include a banner, text, then small photo gallery (thumbnails) linked with Flickr or other cloud service, also would like include map for location, links on other recourses (websites), have tags for easy searching and categories to find more.
Good feature if users can comments and favorite posts. Another feature I am interested have tag cloud, showing popular tags, etc. So I am assuming it is possible with K2 or some other extensions?

Yes you could do that with k2 although you would need to load certain functionality from other modules e.g. jbmaps2, zentools2 etc

Cheers
Paul

Using the loadposition core joomla plugin may be useful at some point

www.ostraining.com/blog/joomla/loadposition-loadmodule/

Cheers
Paul