Hub was high on my list of favourite Joomla templates from our back catalogue and so I'm super excited that Hub2 is now available for Joomla3, using T3 and Bootstrap 3. It's also a fully responsive template so it makes a very obvious choice for someone who needs a sophisticated magazine style theme for Joomla 3.

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A new base theme

Hub2 is the first theme built on our new base theme, Base3. Base3 will be released next week as a second additional club theme release for March.

Sidebar and Maincontent layout control

Base3 features some changes to the way that we work with T3. I love the power and flexibility of T3 but one of the big limitations has been the exclusion of the maincontent and sidebar from the admin layout control. Those of you who have used T3 will know all about this limitation but for those who don't, T3 is amazing at giving draggable control of module positions unless it is a content sidebar.

I've spoken to the T3 team at length about this and understand their decision to not provide that control but for our users I felt it provided too much of a block, especially when T3 is so awesome at providing control everywhere else.

And so in Base3 and in Hub2, this is now possible. Sidebars are controlled by the layout control in the admin so there is no more need to edit the layout files manaully to change the width of the main content and sidebar areas.

Add your logo in a module position

Another new change in Base3 is that we moved a lot of control of the logo out of the template and into a module position. This means that to create a logo for your site it's a matter of publishing a custom html module to the logo module position. While the logo fonts are still controlled via the template admin, making the logo a module position gives a lot more flexibility when it comes to controlling the position and width of the module area. So in order to control the width of the logo area you can now use the draggable layout tool in the T3 admin.

Built in One Page functionality

Base3 and Hub2 have a one page option baked right into the code. So if that's your thing then it's very easy to make the main menu links scroll to various anchors on the page rather than point to other pages.

Click the menu item

Scroll down the page

Offcanvas Sidebar

One of the features of T3Bs3 that I really love is an off canvas sidebar that is not linked to the collapse state of the main menu. Hub2 and Base3 offer complete control over this area so it's possible to change the width, header, background, link and text colour from right within the Theme Magic settings. So if you want to create a sidebar like the one on the Joomlabamboo website then now is your chance.

More improvements under the hood

In addition to the above there are a tonne of optimisations and improvements in the theme codebase that certainly helps improve the way that we work and will undoubtedly improve your site performance.

Base3 will be released mid way through next week while Hub2 is available for you to download now.

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