After a little bit of a hiatus from our Joomla 1.7 template release schedule, I am very happy to announce the availability of the Grid2 Joomla 1.7 Template. If you are unfamiliar with Grid2 you can see the template overview or the live demo.

We released Grid2 back in June 2010 as a follow up to the original Grid template and it's been a massively popular template for photographers, artists and pretty much anyone who liked the display of the grid layout on the front page.

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This is just a small update on the progress of the Focus Joomla Template that should be available for you to play with next week sometime. I've been having a bit of fun playing with media queries and for those browsers that can handle media queries - Don't worry I'm not looking at you internet explorer - the template will resize very nicely and rearrange some key elements to make them accessible at all screen resolutions.

I am personally a big fan of the media query route when designing for mobile devices. It might just be me, but I find having to click to a view the full website when I am surfing on my iphone a pain, and depending on the site I might even be tempted to browse away rather than navigate to the full site.

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I've just rolled out a small but helpful addition to the Joomlabamboo profile area that adds some useful tools for our club members. The update includes added support for tabs that links to all of your ticket system requests, your Joomla template downloads as well as the twitter feed from the JB Activity twitter stream.

There are a few visual tweaks to the layout as well as some code optimisation to improve the ajax loading functionality of some of the tabs; these changes will hopefully tide us over until the next major overhaul of the Joomlabamboo main site (whenever that is).

I plan on adding some more stuff in the near future - such as some common documentation and getting started links as well as some other little bits and pieces but for now I think the profile area should prove to be a helpful resource for our members.

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Last week I made a revolutionary choice (for me anyway) and switched from using a light Textmate theme to a theme with a dark background.

In the past whenever I have fooled around with the preference settings in textmate I've always felt that there could be no way that I would choose a theme with a dark background over a light background. The high contrast of the dark background always seemed far too intense for my eyes and made it almost ridiculously hard to follow text on the page.

But now - for good or bad - I am sticking with the unmodified Textmate theme called twilight. The contrast is less severe than some of the other dark themes and it may turn out to be a useful way to make a small change in my workflow.

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Sometimes it's the little things that trip you up ... and so it was the other night that Paul Bundred and I tried to figure out how to reorder modules in the Joomla 1.7 module manager. It turned out to be one of those things that took 20 minutes to figure out and a little bit of swearing at the screen but was ultimately solved in two simple steps.

The Challenge

Try as I might we couldn't seem to get the up / down arrows to show on the page or even type into the ordering box to effect any change in the way my modules were ordered on the page.

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Our September Joomla template release is shaping up to be a bit of a departure from some our recent offerings. We have been playing with this jQuery full screen slideshow plugin and in a word it is simply beautiful to work with.

The way it is shaping up it is going to be a killer photographer's folio / blog template with some pretty extraordinary features for getting your work out there. The theme will mix some subtle overlay patterns, static and fixed elements and also importantly a very intuitive way to create your fullscreen slideshows to slide and fade on the background of your site.

Be sure to check out the screenshots after the jump.

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In some of our recent Joomla templates like Newscycle and as far back as Rasa, you may have noticed that we implemented some subline styling ion the menu items. A design element that has gained a fair amount of attention and use from the design community in the last 12 months or so.

Up until now we have relied on a small modification to the awesome bbcode plugin from YV to do the heavy lifting. It always seemed like overkill to us to draw upon such a small part of that plugin's feature set and also add to the general memory load that comes with using multiple content replace plugins on a Joomla site, so a few weeks ago we decided to bundle those styles into our versatile and free JB Type plugin.

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The Meridian Joomla template is a subtle and minimal textured template that is a little bit clean, a little bit dirty and very very earthy. It comes with the usual flexibility of the Zen Grid Framework, a smashing k2 Joomla Template and some elegant colour schemes that are perfect for an earthy, eco friendly business website.

Meridian is available as a Joomla 1.5 and Joomla 1.7 template and comes with quickstart packages as well.

Check out Meridian's features and gallery, the template documentation and live preview or if you are already a member go straight to the download page and get your copy. If you are not yet a member you can sign up and get instant access to the template files.

Lapsed members can also take advantage of the jbrenewal2 coupon and receive 10% off the subscription price.

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Overhauling the frame and navigation for our Joomla template showcase is one of those things that has been on my todo list for way too long. In addition to showing tooltip images of the templates when you hover over the links (not a revolutionary feature I know), the Joomla version compatibility has also been added to the template info.

I will be adding more stuff like a description and zen grid framework compatibility notice, as well as hopefully plugging in a theme variation drop down as well. So for now I've just rolled out the first stage of the upgrade but I think it improves things dramatically. Stay tuned for more developments and of course the August Joomla template release which should be arriving in the next few days or early next week.

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The Rasa Joomla template was released in September last year and has been a favourite among those who like their Joomla templates simple, cleanm and minimal. If you need a little refresh of what it looked like be sure to check out the live preview, or if you are already a member you can download the template and quickstart now.

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The next Joomla Template on the list to be ported to Joomla 1.6 from our catalogue is the Ecolift template from August last year. Ecolift is a grungy textured template that has been used a lot for businesses that specialise in ecofriendly, clean, natural and green living type of industries.

For a refresher on what Ecolift looks like be sure to check out the demo site or visit the features page to see what it has to offer. Members can download the ecolift template now.

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Yesterday the good folk over at Dioscouri announced the availability of Tienda v0.7.3. If you are on the Tienda bug tracking mailing list you would have thought something was up given the hundreds, nay, thousands of emails that have come through in the last week or so.

The new release has added some nifty new features, fixed a raft of bugs and also incorporated a google +1 button for Tienda products. Thankfully this was a relatively easy update for us so the Shop Ignition, Shopfront and Zen Simple Shop Joomla templates have all been updated with the necessary code for you to take advantage of the new functionality.

For a full run down of the new Tienda features checkout the changelog and while you are there grab yourself a copy of the latest installment. Joomlabamboo club members can download the latest template versions for our three Tienda templates right now.

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