Hello, I have been recently appointed as administrator of the Seminario Vittorio Veneto website, which I inherited after two years of its existence. Had to upgrade it from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 3, in the process I purchased the Nebula template in order to have it functional (old template broke with the upgrade).

I am struggling to bring the site layout under my control: the backend is a nightmare of apparently unused plugins which break the site when I try to uninstall them, and a great part of the articles has styling overrides which I'll have to clean up by hand. Unfortunately my Joomla skills are quite dated and so are my HTML and CSS, as web administrating/mastering/designing is not my primary field, so I am afraid my questions, which follow, will be of the basic/annoying kind: the learning curve is a bit steep for me, and I do not have the time to learn, but must produce visible results.

Please feel free to answer one point at a time: I understand that I brought in a lot of issues.

1. Typography: google fonts. In the template manager I am not sure what the correct syntax for google webfonts, especially for subsetting.
2. Typography: general. Where do I style the size of article text, its leading and alignment, paragraph distance and so on? I seem to understand that the size of text in all styles is proportional to the one set in template manager. How can I fine-tune this, and specify different sizes for headings etc?
3. Article width. In ThemeMagic I see the template has an overall width of 920 px, which suits me fine; I would prefer though to have articles narrower than the global width - say cca 700 px, for better legibility.
4. Article image positioning and margins. Is there a way to globally set the maximum size, float alignment and margins for images within articles? Or is there a way to force images (inline, intro and extended article to span across all the article width?
5. Article headers. Is there a way to display the category path above the article heading? I saw it in other JoomlaBamboo templates. Also, where do I find settings for display and styling of author and date of creation?
6. Social integration. Is there a way to insert at the beginning or end of all articles the social plugin from zenkit? Where do I control its styling?
7. Home page. As you can see from visiting the site home page, there is a blank space preceded and followed by a separator. Hoping to get rid of it, I had set a blank page as a homepage, and pointed to it through the main menu. It did not work. Am I missing something? The displayed modules are mapped above and below the main article content.

Thanks for your patience and time.

Hi

1. What font are you looking to add?

2. Customise wise - you would need to add small css snippets to the custom css file

3. You would need to add padding via custom.css file

4. Again you would add some css to the custom.css file

5. For the first page do you mean breadscrumbs? that would be the breadcrumbs module published to the breadcrumb position

5 part 2. Would be the k2 settings for the category combined with a combination of template and zenkit css styling

6. You can add k2 options for social functionality by working with the settings in the k2 category

7. I'm not quite following the blank space bit - do you mean in the zentools module? I can't see an issue in the menu

You can hide front page content using using the hide frontpage content found in the general tab of the template settings that turns the an article into module space only

You also have different layout options to chose from via the layout tab

The issue could be module assignment, positions used in the template are not enabled in the responsive layout of the template settings

www.joomlabamboo.com/blog/how-to-joomla/how-to-resize-position-widths-in-t3-templates

With the initial question you are covering a lot of ground so I'd suggest if you are still stuck provide more detail on the specific areas of the site you want to target

Cheers
Paul

Thanks for your detailed answers. I am currently working on the site, so I am dealing with one issue at a time.

paulus103 wrote: Libre Baskerville for text body and Source Sans pro for headings.

paulus103 wrote: Yes, I meant breadcrumbs. Sorry for the dumb question: do I need an extension of any kind to create a bradcrumb module? In affirmative case, would you mind suggesting one which would fit with the template's default look and feel?

paulus103 wrote: I see. However, I am a total greener when it comes to K2. My predecessor installed it, but alas, it's completely empty and unconfigured, which leaves me wondering whether I should import the whole 150+ article site to K2 and invest additional time in configuration and contributor training, or not.

Their documentation site scares me off a bit, as it does not appear to be very detailed.

Should I dive headfirst into it? I mean, will learning it make me more time-effective, aside from allowing me to resolve these particular issue?

1. Just the standard font type with no other font settings?

5. The breadcrumb module is part of the joomla core

so in module manager click the new button and chose the breadmodule type and publish to the breadcrumb position

K2 is more complex that normal Joomla so it depends really what you want to achieve

You could use standard joomla articles and add social functionality via a module/extension

It really depends how much work you have to do and the time frame

paulus103 wrote: I'd like to be able to select some weights plus italic and a possibly a latin subset so that the page does not need to load the entire font. Or will I have to do that from custom css as well? In either case - T3 or CSS - I have no idea about the syntax to use.

I am reworking the site structure (categories, menus etc) from the ground up, as it was a total mess, everything was put into place by hand, with duplicated articles, categories, menus and intro texts: in order for the contributors to work autonomously I need to set up the structure so that once a new article is tagged, categorised and possibly starred for featuring, Joomla does the dirty work. What's worse, I am doing it on a very slow ISDN connection, which is slower than DSL.

I do not have much time really. I have been working on it for some 10-12 hours, while learning how to do things in the process. Will have some more 10-12 hours, during which I need to set up at least the modules and category behaviour, and ideally a bit of styling, in order for my bosses to see that I have been actually doing something. (I guess we have a communication problem concerning this project, as my bosses are totally computer illiterate and consider me some kind of computer wizard, which I am not, and am not able to convince them of the contrary ).

Personal struggles aside, how do I achieve the layout you showcase for the News # 2/3/4 article page on the Nebula template (article width + sidebar)?

Hi

What layout are you using?

Have you published a module to the sidebar-2?

Cheers
Paul

Hello Paul,

Am using the default one, as I was afraid that with customising I'd break something (had not cleared the old ubiquitous duplicated menus at the time).


Now I tried publishing a random module to sidebar-2 and it does the trick. I had not seen that position within the template layout tab, so I missed it. It's because it is a default Joomla position, isn't it?

8) Should I try the sidebar-left preset?

9) Am proofchecking the site on mobile, and I noticed that in the template layout tab the bottom 1-2-3-4 positions can be stacked, set in couples or hidden. Is there a way to hide the image, in order to turn them into simple text links?

Thanks for your continuous support.

not quite sure why its not listed as a template position - the position is part of the template

8) Regarding the sidebar-left preset do you need the sidebar on the left?

9) What images are you looking at hiding? - is this a zentools or a standard custom html module?

Cheers
Paul

paulus103 wrote: 8) Nope, I like it on the right. But there is just one sidebar preset, and it's called sidebar-left. But I still do not see any sidebar-left in the template layout tab: it only appears among the positions available for mapping modules within the module editor (zentools or other).

9) Yes, it is a zentools: I like their flexibility and ease of use. It's the four boxes at the bottom of the home page.

10) speaking of which, is it possible to hide a zentools module from some specific article within a category, (in desktop view)? I am not able to do it, tried to move those articles to a subcategory, but it still shows. I am not sure whether it has to do with the fact that the parent menu item stays the same, and modules are mapped to menu items and not to categories.

8) I'm not quite sure what the issue is with the GUI but it does work like that

9) you need to enable the custom.css file first are you familiar with this?

10) You are losing my slightly with this one but you can hide modules using classes aimed at certain widths/devices

Or you can control the module assignement using article links rather than category and use a hidden menu - using a hidden menu is this something you are familiar with?

Cheers
Paul

For example if you post add this

#zentools139 .zentools.grid h3 {margin-bottom:0}
#zentools139 .zentools.grid .zenimage {margin-bottom: 0px;}
#zentools139 .grid_5 .zentitle {min-height:120px}

and experiment with the min height value it should resolve your uneven title length issue (causing alignment problems)

Cheers
Paul

Thanks for the tips so far.
I need the sidebar on the right. I now cloned a sidebar-left configuration in the template/layout tab, and adapted the module positions and responsive layout in order for the grid 5 and grid 8 positions to appear as if in a right sidebar configuration. But, as you can see from the internal pages, any module published to either sidebar 1 or sidebar 2 ends on the left (it does make sense, since I adapted a sidebar-left preset). Where do I change this?
Not familiar with it, but am familiar with css. Tried to, saw what it did, thank you. Will look into it at another time - this kind of styling ranks lower on my priority list. Currently I am focusing on the site structure.
That's probably the direction I want to take. I have not worked with a hidden menu before though. Would you mind briefly explaining the basics or pointing me to a piece of documentation of any kind?

9) A bit it more info for this feature

www.joomlabamboo.com/index.php?option=com_kunena&view=topic&catid=661&id=110521&Itemid=215

10) More info about hidden menu - the article looks at it from what goes wrong if you don't have menu links

www.joomlabamboo.com/blog/how-to-joomla/implementing-a-fix-for-menu-item-ids-in-joomla

Layout wise have you tried using the default layout that should give you a sidebar option as required

Cheers
Paul