It's the start of a new year and so I thought it was time for a fresh coat of paint.

Over the small amount of downtime over the christmas and new year period that I took, I decided to rework the Joomlabamboo blog. Some of you with a keen appreciation of such things will have noticed that we have been more or less radio silent on the blog for the last half of 2015.

There were a number of factors that lead to this - which I will go into in detail in another post - but I thought what better way to get over such a long period of inactivity than with a redesign and for added measure a redesign on a new platform.

Hello2016 Coupon price reduction

Before I get into the details of the redesign I will tell you about our special 35% price reduction across all of our subscriptions over the holiday period. I've just switched off the coupon code in favour of adjusting the subscription prices to match the discount.

Sign up or upgrade.

Please note: This price reduction will end on the 10th January, 2016.

The new design

The old blog design was actually close to perhaps three years old and didn't really fit with the other designs of the site. I've always wanted to maintain the Joomlabamboo websites using similar but differing designs to mark out to users that they were on separate areas of the site while still retain elements of the main joomlabamboo site. So the new design (hopefully does that) with a cleaner and flatter design and a colour scheme that compliments the main Joomlabamboo colours.

The layout is pretty simple - collapsing sidebar, maincontent, comments, top menu and announcement area, with a significantly better implementation for mobile devices.

Small Screens

Large article titles.

The new platform

One of the big changes we made in 2015 was that all of the documentation for new templates and the Zen Grid Framework run on the Grav Flat file cms. And so I figured a long with the new design I would also move from K2 to Grav.

Grav is the brain child of Andy Miller from Rocket Theme and it is an incredibly flexible CMS that uses markdown files to deliver your content. I have really enjoyed working with Grav over the last 6 months and building the blog template over the last few days has really opened my eyes to it's potential. You can be assured that you will see more Grav related bamboo news in the near future.

Making the move was relatively painless after I figured out the detail around mapping the data from K2 to Grav's flat files. I wrote a rough and ready script that helped with that process and so the script (almost painlessly) moved the content from the old blog to Grav, converted it to markdown and also made me a cup of tea.

Using Deploybot to push to the server

One of the things I like about using Grav is that I can easily use Git to work with the entire site. I know you can use Git with Joomla, Wordpress or whatever platform you may be using but with Grav I get to use markdown in my text editor and then simply push the results to the site's repo. No bother with logging in and managing an interface. I also use deploybot to automatically push any changes in the repo to the live site so there is very little tinkering required.

No more typos

Well here's hoping ... I know it's old school, but one more key benefit for me, is the ability to use a text editor to prepare all of the site's content. I am a consummate creator of typos - (I wrote two typos just writing that sentence). So using a text editor means that I can search and replace across the entire site's content within a matter of seconds and then push to the server the changes.

Enjoy the blog at your leisure.

As I mentioned above I will be posting an update regarding the Joomlabamboo state of the union in the next few days, but for now please feel free to roam around the site, report any bugs you spot or just tell us what you think of the change. Enjoy!

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