I'm very happy to announce the availability of our April Joomla template release - Arcadia.

Arcadia is a fun and creative responsive Joomla template that features an awesome header design from Glenn Thomas aka The Fox and the King. Glenn has a unique visual style and after meeting him a few months ago in the new studio space I couldn't wait to put his style into a Joomla template for you. I'll be publishing an interview with Glenn in the next few days so stay tuned if you want to find out more about this amazing Melbourne artist.

Arcadia is built on the T3 framework and features a tonne of theming options and some very flexible functionality. It's built to be compatible with our new Zenkit v2 release (Demo coming soon) so all of you K2 fans out there will be able to drop Arcadia into an existing or new K2 site without any trouble at all.

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We have been a little quiet on the blog since the release of our last Joomla template, Zenhost, but that's mainly because we have had our collective heads down working on hard on some exciting new things.

First cab off the rank is V2 of our Zenkit templates - standalone, responsive templates for K2.

Zenkit is all grown up now and I'm happy to say it is even more flexible, with some nice new styling, layouts and functionality.

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I've just unwrapped our latest Joomla template and it's a little gem.

Zenhost is a clean and simple business template built for those of you who sell your goods, products or services online. It's a flexible theme built with bootstrap and T3 and comes with a slew of features and options to make it your own.

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The minimal Joomla template called Blanko, released as a part of the Zen Building Block collection is now available as a Joomla 3 Template.

Blanko is a the simplest of the five Joomla templates released in the package and is a clean slate for you to start creating your site from.

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I'm happy to announce that the Standard Joomla template is now available in a Joomla 3 compatible version.

If you recall the initial release of Standard back in September 2012, it was released as a part of our Zen Building Blocks collection. The Zen Building blocks were released as a pack of responsive starter Joomla templates that aimed to cover a wide variety of common layout types.

T3, LESS and Joomla 3 ready ...

The updated theme has some awesome control over colours using Theme Magic. I wrote about the possibilities of using Theme Magic a little earlier today and I think that when you take a look at the Theme Magic options available in this new release of Standard, I'm pretty sure you will agree that this is an incredible customisation tool.

As per all of our T3 based themes it comes with support for LESS, is built using bootstrap and has the same responsive layout control as our other recent Joomla 3 template releases.

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Theme magic is a non-destructive real time preview tool for your T3 powered website.

Theme Magic makes it possible to create a multitude of theme presets and colour schemes by using a colour wheel or specific HEX values in order to manipulate pre-determined elements within the template.

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Zenbase is a vanilla / skeleton / blank / scaffold (or anything else you want to call it) Joomla 3 Template. It is a free Joomla 3 template that is an ideal starting point for your next project using Joomla 3 and T3.

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Please note: The Live preview of the Zen base theme features the Zentools module however the free quickstart package does not include this member only extension.

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Inspire is a versatile responsive Joomla template that combines dark textured / grungey backgrounds with sharp bevelled lines and an array of elegant typography. It is our second Joomla template compatible with Joomla 3 and built on the T3 template framework.

(If you missed the news about our move t…

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I'm very happy to announce the availability of our first Joomla 3 Template release.

I've been wanting to do a third and responsive version of our popular Grid and Grid2 templates for soem time now and thought that the release of our first joomla3 template was a good time to do it.

Grid3 is a beautiful bootstrap and T3 powered (read about our recent change here) Joomla template which is the perfect companion for any artist, photographer or image based web site. Iyt has some incredible functionality built in courtesy of T3 and is fast, lightweight and responsive.

I'll be writing more in the coming days about our new workflow with working woth Joomla 3 and bootstrap but for now check out these important links below:

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After a lot of in depth analysis, soul searching and reading tea leaves, we have decided to move our Joomla template releases to the T3v3 framework.

This has not been an easy decision to make but we are confident that it is the right decision. A lot of people have been surprised about the change, so let me take you through the reasoning behind the decision.

So, What is the T3 framework?

The T3 framework is a Joomla template toolkit that provides a set of useful tools for creating Joomla templates. It is developed by Joomlart and released as an open source platform that anyone can use.

It is an installable plugin that is installed in addition to your Joomla template but essentially sits in the background providing some of the core functionality and features that ship as a part of the template's feature set.

Why move to the T3 framework?

1. T3 is where I wanted the Zen Grid Framework (ZGF) to be.
When I first looked at T3v3 (around 6 weeks ago) I was blown away by the maturity and functionality of the framework. After speaking to Hung from Joomlart I was further reassured that what I could see in the code and on the page matched the design philosophy that we were also pursuing with ZGF.

T3v3 is a complete rebuild of their framework with an emphasis on performance and responsive / mobile functionality. The templating system and core functionality has been completely stripped back, reworked and revisioned - almost making it a completely new template framework.

2. The same zen philosophy on a new and improved codebase.
One of the big factors for me was the fact that the T3 templating system is very similar to the ZGF layout override functionality. It's actually a lot simpler to use and makes customisation a lot more obvious to the developer minded - I'll be writing a tutorial on how to customise your Joomlabamboo T3 template in the next few days.

The template system is so flexible that we can more or less keep the existing markup from our current framework with the same module positions and naming convention which - with a little luck - will mean that upgrading your ZGF Joomla 1.5 / Joomla 2.5 template will be a relatively easy task.

For all intents and purposes, shifting to the T3 framework for the developers will not be a giant leap and I think the improved flexibility and accessibility will make up for any short fall in understanding the new workflow.

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This session is in addition to the talk I'll be giving about more general templating strategies during the conference program and will focus on getting into the nitty gritty of developing Joomla templates using our framework and other zen products.

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Collector is an all in one Social media collecting / streaming theme that can pool and display content from your favourite social media sources.

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