Joomla Update Manager
Sunday, 03 January 2010 00:14
Kind of excited to find this. It's an automatic update tool for your Joomla install. Reminds me of the updater you can get for Wordpress. I just used it to update to 1.5.15 and it worked great!
I did run a quick Joomlapack backup before running it of course.
Here's the link: http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/core-enhancements/installers/9332
Joomla Zen (Naked) Theme
Sunday, 13 December 2009 22:02
I kind of left this project on the shelf for a bit. Tonight I worked up a bit of a stripped-down version of what I had in mind. This I think will be useful as a bare-bones framework for building a theme. It's fixed-width (960 pixels wide) but with a little adjustment it can be any width.
The main divs inside the fixed wrapper include a header, footer, left column, and a main column with an optional right column. The main column ID name depends on whether any modules are positioned in the right column.
I'd like to push this a bit further with the next version. It would be great to make it so the user can select in the Joomla template manager whether to make this a fixed or fluid-width layout. I'm looking at how the ja_purity template handles this. I would draw some inspiration from how the Wordpress theme Thesis works. That idea could possibly take me into an entirely different direction.
So at any rate, you can download the current version (1.0.0) here.
EDIT: 1/02/10...
Completely reworked this theme. Made a few improvements and adhered more closely to Joomla's stock template's module positions. I think this gives you an even better starting point.
Download it here.
Joomla DayCaring Theme
Sunday, 02 August 2009 20:42
I'm still in the process of developing a template/theme along the vein of Drupal's Zen theme. I took a break from what I have so far and also used a bit of the process to cook up my first "shared" theme. The idea behind this design was that it could be used for a child-themed website.
I named it DayCaring.
It's pretty simple, not a huge amount of graphics which should lend to a fast load. A good deal of the graphics load went into the header where I used a sort of "parallax-effect" I wanted to experiment with. I used this page for inspiration and to see how it could be done. Because the look of the site is kind of flat/cartoony I didn't bother blurring the layers to reinforce the illusion of depth of field. Check out the preview and resize your browser window to see it.
Another sort of special effect I wanted to try out was using JQuery to enforce the height of sibling divs. I think it worked out pretty well. This is a design problem that a lot of XHTML/CSS designers run into when creating a tableless layout. How do you make the shorter div with a colored background extend to the length of the page when the column next door is longer? Usually you cheat.
I tested this on Firefox and IE 8 (and 8 in compatability mode) and will probably run it through Safari and maybe IE 6 if I'm feeling particularly masochistic. It seems to work pretty well with all the content in the standard Joomla "sample content" output. I tried where possible to make allowances for WYSIWYG editing, adding images to content, and so forth.
Click the screenshot below for a preview of the flat HTML version I built before the template. Template zip link below...
Download the template.
Edit: 1/2/10...
I made a few tweaks using my latest zen theme this changes the template positions up so they reflect more closely Joomla default module positions.
You can download it here.
Joomla Zen Theme
Wednesday, 27 May 2009 21:25
After stripping and reskinning a number of Joomla themes I'm thinking it's time to develop a base theme to start from more suited to my needs. There's a theme set for Drupal with this in mind and it is inspired by the CSS Zen Garden project. I haven't been able to find anything similar to this in the Joomla world but admittedly I did not spend a lot of time looking at pre-built themes. As I mentioned in a previous post I tend to like using the Beez template. I've found its custom html output very useful for making changes to how Joomla builds pages. The custom html is great because you don't have to hack the Joomla core to make some changes like forcing article headings to output an h1 instead of h2.
At my work we have a kind of consensus on <div> naming conventions and a fair amount of time is spent on refitting the Beez index.php file's div structure to match ours. Our GUI team also doesn't tend to use so many stylesheets. Personally I like to use one main sheet, maybe a reset stylesheet to remove latent browser bugs and a couple of ie specific sheets. The template I have been basing my custom skinning on features several and it gets pretty confusing. Setting up a clean, intuitive layout with plenty of commentation will be helpful for standardizing my Joomla theming workflow on the job and on my own.
Edit: 1/2/10...
Download the latest zen template here.
Joomla Theme Fun
Thursday, 12 March 2009 21:33
Joomla Themeing is pretty interesting. I've done a Drupal site shortly after doing a massive cleanup of a Drupal site that was handed off to me in unsatisfactory condition. I seem to learn a lot when I have something that's broken and I need to get it working. My first PC comes to mind...
So anyway I have 3 Joomla sites under production right now with my current employer. When they go live I'll post some screenshots on them here.
My workflow for theming is pretty much:
1. Using the comp I construct a home and secondary page in XHTML. Having clean-valid code before you start theming helps a lot.
2. Take a copy of the Beez template and rip all of the CSS out. My first Joomla site I tried to hunt-and-patch through the CSS files and pretty much went insane trying to find and fix all of the styles.
3. Plug in the CSS I constructed in step 1 and start building content around it.
What's nice about Beez is that it's already tableless XHTML layout. All the standard components are setup and ready for your styles. The main drawback is the use of several CSS files (layout, position, etc). I personally don't like to chase styles around 4 different stylesheets.
Beez on the web: http://www.joomla-beez.com/
