7 tips to help you convert your Joomla 1.5 template to Joomla 1.6

This morning I read a great post from our friends over at JoomlaPraise, about some of the changes involved in converting a Joomla Template from Joomla 1.5 to 1.6. Now that beta 4 has been released, with beta 5 scheduled to be released on July 12, it’s definitely time for template developers to start the process of converting their existing Joomla templates over to 1.6.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on a new free template (Witblits) and last week I decided to start porting it over to Joomla 1.6. Due to the lack of current documentation, there were quite a few things I had to just “figure out” by scouring through articles, comments, bug reports, discussion boards, etc. I managed to figure out most of the issues I encountered and reading Kyles post this morning inspired me to contribute some of my findings to help make the transition over to Joomla 1.6 easier. (more…)

Tags: howto, joomla 1.6, templates, upgrading

Pure CSS3 Infobox, with no additional presentational markup

I recently came across a really interesting article that showcased some of the sweet goodness that can be achieved using css3 – the end result being a really slick infobox with 3d ribbons, that uses no images at all.

The article was inspired by another similar post (“How to create depth and nice 3d ribbons only using css3″), written by piervix from PVMGarage. Both were great articles, but one thing that bugged me in both, was the need for additional presentational markup, which served no purpose to the actual content. (more…)

Tags: css, css3, Labs

Update on Morph’s JomSocial integration

We recently had a discussion on the JoomlaJunkie forums, about Creativa’s schedule for integrating with 3rd party extensions. Based on the feedback we received, we decided last week to step up our original plan for the JomSocial integration (since Creativa is a Community style themelet after all).

I’ve been doing extensive digging, probing and studying of JomSocial’s templating system, so as to better understand how far we can push the limits, and I’m really happy to say that I can definitely see an exciting future for Morph and Jomsocial! Not only is JomSocial a great extension to work with, but thanks to the willingness and cooperation from Azrul’s team I am pretty much certain we’ll be able to give you guys something really special. (more…)

Tags: Integrations, JomSocial, Joomla, Morph, templates

New generic quick installer for Morph now available

The quick installer is a combination of the latest version of Joomla, a number of pre-installed and configured extensions that we have tried and tested to be useful time savers, along with well structured dummy content and menu items.

See it all in action on the new Vanilla themelet demo

Our aim with the generic quick installer is:

1. Help you get up and running faster.
2. Act as a tool that you can learn from.
3. Reduce the time it takes to get a demo up.
4. Showcase the extensive work on Joomla’s core layouts.
5. Act as a practical example of Morph’s different page and module suffixes in action.

When developing a themelet, we use this as the starting point, so all themelets will be based on the same original content structure.

Introducing the generic quick installer for Morph

This generic Quick Installer for Morph is a packaged version of the latest Joomla 1.5.x, a number of useful, timing saving extensions as well as our own extensions installed and setup.

Everything is configured for Morph out the box, along with well structured sample content that you can learn from. (more…)

Tags: development, Extensions, Joomla, Morph

Exploring alternatives to Joomla’s default sidebar module position names

One thing that has bugged us for absolute ages is the default names of module positions used in Joomla templates. Specifically, the “left” and “right” positions, which are generally used in a templates sidebars.

The issue we have with the current naming convention is that it assumes that the sidebar’s position will always be on the left or right of the primary content. (more…)

Tags: discussions, framework, Joomla, Morph, templates