Over the last few months we have been working on the next major update to our Joomla template framework, which was released as a beta a few weeks ago. Over the last few days I've spent a bit of time redesigning the interface to make it a little more 'bamboo' and the screenshots below are the end result.

One of the things I wanted to focus on was a much clearer hierarchy for the navigation and so have opted for the vertical side nav as the main navigation area, with horizontal sub menu items sitting at the top of the page. This, in addition to the larger and more descriptive icons on the sidebar (download them here) in my opinion give a better emphasis to how the settings and information are organised.

I'm also hoping to integrate our documentation much more effectively into the template admin as well, but more on that later.

Screenshots

There are still plenty of little things that will be fine tuned before release and of course we will run it through the bamboo testing pool first as well to get some feedback from end users.

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