I've just unwrapped our latest Joomla template and it's a little gem.

Zenhost is a clean and simple business template built for those of you who sell your goods, products or services online. It's a flexible theme built with bootstrap and T3 and comes with a slew of features and options to make it your own.

Live PreviewFeaturesDownload

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The old saying that you have to be in it to win it, has been slightly twisted today because "Everyone who was in it did win it" ... Well one person won it slightly more than the others, but everyone who entered the "Show us your workspace" competition from a few weeks ago will receive at least a 3 month subscription just for the effort of entering the competition.

I really enjoyed all of the entries and seeing all of your spaces. As I've mentioned previously, while web work can be physically isolating, there are ways that we can make our online experience more intimate and personal. One of those ways is to see where the people we email, skype, post forum threads to and tweet with works.

So without further to do ... drum roll please ...

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I love the installer on this new photography focussed cms - Koken.me. It's dark and very beautiful.

[

](http://koken.me/)

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The minimal Joomla template called Blanko, released as a part of the Zen Building Block collection is now available as a Joomla 3 Template.

Blanko is a the simplest of the five Joomla templates released in the package and is a clean slate for you to start creating your site from.

Features Download

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I'm happy to announce that the Standard Joomla template is now available in a Joomla 3 compatible version.

If you recall the initial release of Standard back in September 2012, it was released as a part of our Zen Building Blocks collection. The Zen Building blocks were released as a pack of responsive starter Joomla templates that aimed to cover a wide variety of common layout types.

T3, LESS and Joomla 3 ready ...

The updated theme has some awesome control over colours using Theme Magic. I wrote about the possibilities of using Theme Magic a little earlier today and I think that when you take a look at the Theme Magic options available in this new release of Standard, I'm pretty sure you will agree that this is an incredible customisation tool.

As per all of our T3 based themes it comes with support for LESS, is built using bootstrap and has the same responsive layout control as our other recent Joomla 3 template releases.

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I had the good fortune to chat with Rod Martin from OS Training a few weeks ago as a part of their OS Talks.

It was good to meet someone I've only ever tweeted with or spoken to via skype or email. Even though the interview wasn't face to face, it was great to finally put a face to the name.

If you are interested, you can see what I look like without my hat on. I've had some feedback that I'm bald (I prefer bald-ing), scruffy (I prefer relaxed casual) and that my accent (what accent?) was hard to understand. But I'll let you be the judge of that.

Enjoy!

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Theme magic is a non-destructive real time preview tool for your T3 powered website.

Theme Magic makes it possible to create a multitude of theme presets and colour schemes by using a colour wheel or specific HEX values in order to manipulate pre-determined elements within the template.

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[I was pretty much over parallax even before it started. Don't get me wrong. I think it's smart and impressive but in a lot of respects I think it's unnecessary.

This Energy Trust site however is a great example of parallax / scrolling / whatever you want to call it.

Each slide makes sense and the transitions from left to right are integral to the content of the site. I think this is a great implementation of this style of design but please let this be the last.

](http://energytrust.org/timeline/)

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Zenbase is a vanilla / skeleton / blank / scaffold (or anything else you want to call it) Joomla 3 Template. It is a free Joomla 3 template that is an ideal starting point for your next project using Joomla 3 and T3.

Features and Download Live Preview

Please note: The Live preview of the Zen base theme features the Zentools module however the free quickstart package does not include this member only extension.

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For the last five years, Ive been running Bamboo HQ from the front room of my house in Melbourne, on a very busy road, amidst the craziness of living in a house with three young children, a Grandpa with a penchant for loud tv and an exuberant schnautzer.

So as a way to celebrate my new found freedom, I have put together a show us your space competition. Just attach an image of your office / workspace in the comments below and you will go in the running to win a 12 month developer subscription - worth $225 AUD.

The winner of the competition will be decided simply by a matter of the most commented workspace by personal bias and whim. So if you like someone’s space - let them know in the space below.

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We moved our core communication platform from Skype to Hip Chat a few months ago and while I wasn't initially that excited about the move the new native app has certainly changed that.

Hip Chat provides a relatively safe place for teams to communicate, without the added distraction of all of your friends knowing that you are online. One of my main bug bears with skype is that it made it difficult to filter out social from work activity, and while I do love to chat with other Joomla folks online, it was becoming more and more problematic in terms of my productivity. Sure I could just ignore or set my status to away but that felt just a little bit rude.

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Zentools v1.9 is a relatively minor update but i thought it warranted a 0.1 increment. You can get a full rundown of the changes and fixes on the Zentools changelog. If you are new to Zentools - check out what it can do on the Zentools demo site.

No need for JB Library in Joomla 3

This new version no longer requires the JB Library plugin when using it in Joomla 3.0 - so there is one less plugin to install on your site now.

Folks using the module in Joomla 2.5 still need either the framework or the library installed to process images as well as load jQuery.

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