This is more of a newbie tip for working with joomla or even with websites in general, but it took me three years to realise the value and to put it into practice and so I thought it was worth relaying.

When I ported our blog from the old J1.0 site to the new K2 driven Joomla 1.5 site, I found that the images from the blog posts were randomly strewn across the Joomlabamboo server. Some were in folders specific to the post, others were on the showcase site, while others were in the images folder and some were just plain missing.

Continue Reading

A few weeks ago I posted 9 Joomla people that I like to follow on twitter - today Im going to post a slightly different list. Most freelancers and web workers, actually anyone who uses the internet, knows how distracting the interwebs can be and that the last thing you need when you are trying to work and get things done, is even more distractions.

However, there are some cases that I think a distraction in the workflow can be quite helpful. I like to call these moments of distraction "unhinging moments". These moments basically help us to break out of a stuck place, take the doors off the boundaries or limitations we might be coming up against and give us a fresh perspective on a problem we might be trying to solve. The concept comes from Zen philosophy and its really about trying to create a shift in your perception in your approach to your work in the same way that a Zen Koan can create a shift in your perception of life, reality and the universe.

Continue Reading

Its been a while since I updated the banners for our Joomla affiliate program and Im happy to say that Ive just uploaded 6 spanking new 125 by 125px banners for you to use for your Joomlabamboo affiliate advertising. The banners come courtesy of Graham Smith from imjustcreative who created the Joomla Bamboo logo.

There are 6 on offer that play on the same theme as the logo but Graham has thrown in two new shiny jungle style banners just for kicks. Stay tuned for some more affiliate banners shortly.

You can sign up to our affiliate program and earn 20% from each sale that you refer to us here.

Check the banners out below:

Continue Reading

If you are familiar with our Joomla extensions, then you will know that we are huge fans of the jQuery JavaScript library. Around May 2008, and the release of the Helio template, we made the switch to jQuery from mootools as our JavaScript framework of choice for all templates and extensions. We had a few main reasons for doing this, and of course given that Joomla rolls with mootools in the core this was not a decision that we took lightly.

The main reason that we chose jQuery was the sheer fact that it is compatible with most other JavaScript frameworks if you run it in no conflict mode. This is a huge boon for the development of our extensions, given that mootools (at least when we were using it) tended to create conflicts from script to script and from version to version. While with jQuery if you stipulated that it should run in no conflict mode then it would happily coexist with any other JavaScript framework.

Continue Reading

A few weeks ago a false security advisory was circulating regarding our Simpla template.

The advisory pointed to an alleged hack that could be used on a Joomla site using the Simpla template but the hack in question used a url that only related to the front end of the site. Front end urls have no bearing on the Joomla backend unless they are targetting a vulnerable third party extension and even then the url has no relation to the Joomla admin template that is set to default.

Regardless of how baseless this advisory appeared to be I sort the help of three independant advisors who unanimously returned the response that its a front end hack (that doesnt relate to the Simpla admin template) and that in fact the hack also appears not to work anyway.

Continue Reading

Please note that our Admin templates are no longer compatible with the latest version of Joomla and have been retired from service.

We are happy to announce the release of our second Joomla admin theme called Crisp.

Crisp is a slick, minimal and dare I say Crisp theme for your Joomla administrator. We have drawn on a lot of the functionalities found in the Simpla template that we released back in December 2009, but have taken the design to a more mature, clean, almost corporate level, by replacing the textural flare of Simpla with some clear, crisp lines and subtle drop shadows.

Crisp includes the following features:

• Six Colour Schemes
• Accordion side bar menu (with sliding toggle)
• Choice of top or side menu or both
• Joomla update notifier
• Session timer and session refresh
• Server time display

Plus more ....

For more info check out the feature overview, the template documentation or the demo. You can see a slightly restricted version of the template on this link where you can login using the username and password admin and admin.

Continue Reading

Its definitely an understatement to say that Internet Explorer 6 isnt much liked in the web design and web development community and while alot of template clubs have stopped supporting IE6 in their template releases and the uptake of other browsers seems to be growing considering the latest IE6 security issue, there are still some simple tools that you can use to track down why something is happening in ie6 and not other browsers. The first thing I check when troubleshooting ie6 is the w3c html validator.

Continue Reading

The more I work with the K2 component from Joomlaworks the more I am in awe of it. The templating engine for me is what drives the potential of this component because it effectively gives you the ability to create unlimited sub templates within a single Joomla template.

The advent of the template overrides in Joomla 1.5 was a real boon for template designers and developers because it meant that we could start overriding the core output from Joomla. This however is limited to a handful of "views" (eg blog category, frontpage etc) which soon becomes a little limiting if you want to start laying out a blog category in more than one way.

Continue Reading

Just a quick note to let you know that I've updated Avanti to be compatible with K2 v2.2. There are a few bug fixes in this release too so be sure to check the Avanti changelog for a full run down of whats changed and how to update it.

Please update your K2 installation to v2.2 to use this template.

On a side note we have some major updates for Microblog and BambooBox coming in the next few days. Among other things we have swapped out fancybox for the awesome colorbox jQuery lightbox which will offer some nice new features to play with when launching your content in the lightbox. Ill post more when thats ready in the next few days.

Continue Reading

We are a big fan of the Extended menu module and use it to generate both the panel and superfish menus you can see on our templates. We recently found a bug that basically adds the menu title alias to the home menu which results in a url like this - mysite.com/home when you click on the home menu item.

Understandably this leads to both seo and general usability issues so you will be happy to know that we have an update for the Extended Menu that we have called Extended Menu v1.0.6 (Fixed).

You can download it from this link.

Continue Reading

During the Joomlabamboo rebuild I found that I was rewriting alot of basic information and so I thought that rather than rewriting it each time Id use the loadposition plugin to do the work. This is a little step by step instruction for using the loadposition plugin on your site as way to repeat or reuse content, images or anything else in your content.

Continue Reading

Continue Reading