Just why do we respond in the same way to certain colours? This is not entirely due to exposure to their use in familiar ways, some part comes from deep inside and a large part of this is what is taught to us as children about the meaning of colour.

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Last week I posted two lists regarding our Joomla template workflow and our template toolkit as well as our top choices for Joomla extensions. Today I thought I would highlight the apps we use to get things done within the JB Team. The workflow involved in running an online business and co-ordinating even a small team of people can get a little tedious and perhaps even tiresome if you dont have the right processes in place and while our system isnt yet perfect this list is an idea of whats working for us now.

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Just why do we respond in the same way to certain colours? This is not entirely due to exposure to their use in familiar ways, some part comes from deep inside and a large part of this is what is taught to us as children about the meaning of colour.

This is the first in a series of articles looking at the meaning and emotion behind some of the more widely used colours from the vast array available at designers’ fingertips.

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At the start of this week I posted a list of applications I use almost religiously for my Joomla template development. During a recent skype chat with Jeremy Wilken aka @gnomeontherun he told me that he was writing his own response to my question and would soon be delivering his killer Joomla template bag of tricks using only PC based tools. Well its online now and if you are a PC user - or just interested - I highly recommend you check out his application suggestions.

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Over the last few years Ive been asked about the tools I use to create the Joomla templates here at Joomlabamboo, and the following is a small collection of apps that I use daily for all aspects of our web development. Im a huge mac fan so some of these apps are only available for mac users and Id be keen to hear from pc users what they use instead. This is by no means a definitive list of apps for web development but working with these apps is second nature now and I think Id have to come across an app that blew my mind to change up this work flow.

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When a designer creates a Joomla template there are various elements involved. The main elements include the graphics of the site, how the various elements link together, the typography available, alternate colour schemes and, in the case of Joomla based templates, there are also the many modules and their positions to be taken into account.

As a designer I like to have a large variety of module locations available to me, however there are times when the sheer volume of modules makes naming them very tricky.

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This is more of a newbie tip for working with joomla or even with websites in general, but it took me three years to realise the value and to put it into practice and so I thought it was worth relaying.

When I ported our blog from the old J1.0 site to the new K2 driven Joomla 1.5 site, I found that the images from the blog posts were randomly strewn across the Joomlabamboo server. Some were in folders specific to the post, others were on the showcase site, while others were in the images folder and some were just plain missing.

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A few weeks ago I posted 9 Joomla people that I like to follow on twitter - today Im going to post a slightly different list. Most freelancers and web workers, actually anyone who uses the internet, knows how distracting the interwebs can be and that the last thing you need when you are trying to work and get things done, is even more distractions.

However, there are some cases that I think a distraction in the workflow can be quite helpful. I like to call these moments of distraction "unhinging moments". These moments basically help us to break out of a stuck place, take the doors off the boundaries or limitations we might be coming up against and give us a fresh perspective on a problem we might be trying to solve. The concept comes from Zen philosophy and its really about trying to create a shift in your perception in your approach to your work in the same way that a Zen Koan can create a shift in your perception of life, reality and the universe.

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Its been a while since I updated the banners for our Joomla affiliate program and Im happy to say that Ive just uploaded 6 spanking new 125 by 125px banners for you to use for your Joomlabamboo affiliate advertising. The banners come courtesy of Graham Smith from imjustcreative who created the Joomla Bamboo logo.

There are 6 on offer that play on the same theme as the logo but Graham has thrown in two new shiny jungle style banners just for kicks. Stay tuned for some more affiliate banners shortly.

You can sign up to our affiliate program and earn 20% from each sale that you refer to us here.

Check the banners out below:

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If you are familiar with our Joomla extensions, then you will know that we are huge fans of the jQuery JavaScript library. Around May 2008, and the release of the Helio template, we made the switch to jQuery from mootools as our JavaScript framework of choice for all templates and extensions. We had a few main reasons for doing this, and of course given that Joomla rolls with mootools in the core this was not a decision that we took lightly.

The main reason that we chose jQuery was the sheer fact that it is compatible with most other JavaScript frameworks if you run it in no conflict mode. This is a huge boon for the development of our extensions, given that mootools (at least when we were using it) tended to create conflicts from script to script and from version to version. While with jQuery if you stipulated that it should run in no conflict mode then it would happily coexist with any other JavaScript framework.

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As a developer I say clearly and loudly no! However when I first began my journey into Joomla territory a Joomla template with lots of module positions was quite frankly terrifying.

The thought of creating a template from scratch was intimidating; yet looking at the templates available the thought of implementing some of them was a truly daunting prospect. Unless you are working with a thoughtful template designer, who provides a screen shot of module positions and a run through of included typography etc, then a complex template will be a nightmare to implement.

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