As some of you may have noticed it's now December and we are yet to release the November template. November has been a funny month for us with some staff changes, a design that didn't quite come into it's own until quite late in the piece as well as needing more time than anticipated to bring a new module to the table. All of this has lead to us being incredibly late with the next template ... but please don't despair there is some good news ahead.

The Platform Joomla Template

The good news is that the November template - Platform - is almost ready and it is stunning. It's a clean full width template that uses Masonry to create complex (but easy to control) layouts in a non-traditional blog format. It is also a responsive design and will scale to suit your iphone, android, ipad device as well small screen and large screen monitors. Check out the full width screenshot here.

The Zentools module

What you see in the screenshots above are one of the layouts in the Zentools module. The idea behind the zentools module is that it combines all of of our current module layouts - eg microblog, slideshow3, jb faq, jtweet into a single module. The module uses a drag and drop interface and works intelligently to only show you parameters that are relevant for the layout you select. So if you select k2 as the source we hide all parameters that relate to using Joomla. My hope is that this will cut down on some of the confusion faced by users when first confronted with the scope of our modules - microblog and slideshow in particular.

Each of the elements that get output on the page is added via an inuitive drag and drop interface.

Zentools Layouts

The aim here is really to condense our codebase and free us up to be able to expand the various layouts available for our popular content based modules. So rather than having a whole stack of different modules that create different layouts we decided to combine all of our current modules into one to create one super module. The layouts currently available are:

• Responsive Slideshow
• Responsive Carousel
• Masonry
• Responsive Grid
• List
• Accordion
• Twitter

The module can also use the following as content sources:

• joomla Content
• K2
• Images from a folder

We hope to be able to add more content sources to this list in the next few weeks.

Shop Ignition for Joomla 1.7

During the last few weeks I've been a little quiet about our releases and updates as well. The largest release over the last few weeks is the Joomla 1.7 version of the Shop Ignition template. This comes with template overrides for the fabulous Red Shop ecommerce extension for Joomla and is built on version 2 of the Zen Grid Framework so you get to use the nice new interface plus all of the other added features that we added to the framework.

So what can you expect next week?

• The release of the Platform template.
• The release of the Zentools module.
• A small update to the Zen Grid Framework
• All of our templates updated to work with k2 2.5+ - Joomla 1.5 and Joomla 1.7
• .. as well as a Joomla 1.7 and Zen Grid Framework compatible version of the New Media template.

When I check the download logs I often get surprised by which older templates are getting downloaded. One of the templates that features consistently in that list is the New Media template, if you haven't seen it before it's a simple template can be useful for news portal sites and magazine type sites.

But hang on that sounds great but my subscription expired so how do I get access to the new stuff?

As is our policy when ever our templates are released late, members whose subscription has expired in the time bewteen the first of the month and the actual date of release can receive the files they were entitled to by contacting us via the contact form.

I hope that once we get this next wave of packages released we will be able to settle back into a routine and have more timely template releases.

I'll post more details regarding the December template release next week.

blog comments powered by Disqus