Here are some interesting Joomla blog posts I found during week 29:
• Joomla Infographic: Joomla 2006-2012
• Responsive Design: Part 1 - RocketTheme's Plan
• Responsive Design: Part 2 - RocketTheme's Solution
• Olympics 2012 – Where we will be
• What does Joomla 3.0 mean for Joomlabamboo?
• Look out Joomla 3.0 is on it's way
• New K2 video class by OSTraining
Written by Steve Burge
Last week we highlighted a wonderful video produced by the Joomla community. This week we have an infographic for you that sums up the first six years of Joomla. The information was gathered by the Joomla Marketing team and the graphic was created by Pawel Borowicz and the team at CloudAccess.net. Please feel free to share this infographic and to use it for your own marketing: Click here to see the infographic at full-size.
Responsive Design: Part 1 - RocketTheme's Plan
Posted by Andy Miller
Unless you have been living under a rock for the past year you will have noticed a growing trend in web design called "Responsive Design". The premise of responsive design is that with the prolific growth in mobile devices, and their vastly varied display sizes, a web site can be designed to adapt to these platforms utilizing media queries. The previous leading school of thought was that the best approach was to provide a mobile specific view that was independent of the main design.
This concept quickly became unmaintainable with the popularity of larger display phones and tablets. While we have up to this point been releasing templates and themes based on the older trend, with next month's release we are moving towards the newer responsive trend. This is the first part in a series of articles that outline RocketTheme's journey down this road.
Responsive Design: Part 2 - RocketTheme's Solution
Posted by Andy Miller
As outlined in the previous article, we are hard at work developing Gantry 4 that will be provide all the bits needed to create responsive designs. In this article I wanted to outline exactly how that will work and what features you can expect. After evaluating all the responsive frameworks and various solutions we have chosen to use the responsive system from the Twitter Bootstrap framework.
Bootstrap is a project from the talented folks at Twitter that was designed to provide "simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for popular user interface components and interactions". If you have been using RokSprocket or RokPad in your projects you may not realize that these were built with elements from Bootstrap. New for Bootstrap 2, is an all new responsive design scaffolding that utilizes a grid system with media queries to provide support for various display types.
What does Joomla 3.0 mean for Joomlabamboo?
Written by Anthony Olsen
In one word it means Bootstrap.
Initially I wasn't particularly fussed about adding bootstrap to the Joomla front end but after looking through the work done in the strapped Joomla 3.0 branch I've been sold. I could see the case for adding bootstrap to the admin - It makes sense to keep a uniform admin experience and to make css and javascript available for developers within the Joomla framework to avoid any extra overhead to the admin. However, I couldn't quite see how adding bootstrap to the Joomla front end made much sense if we wanted to maintain the diverse design focussed eco system that currently exists for Joomla.
After looking through the Strapped front end template I finally got the point.
While there are some intelligent and informed discussions regarding Bootstrap and there are good points on both sides, I do think this is the best way to move forward for Joomla front end development. In essence implementing bootstrap for the front end means that designers can get back to designing, easily being able to draw upon the flexibility of the underlying bootstrap framework.
Look out Joomla 3.0 is on it's way
Written by Anthony Olsen
If you missed the announcement last week, Joomla 3.0 Alpha is now available for those Joomla users who like to cut their teeth on the very latest version of Joomla. While this release is aimed squarely at developers to come up to speed with the changes to the Joomla platform and the cms, it's well worth downloading the alpha to get a glimpse of what Joomla will look like in the very near future. To download the branch of the alpha with all of the new bootstrap and Joomla admin interfaces you need to grab the zip from this Git hub repo. It's hoped that the new templates will be available in Alpha 2 if all goes to plan, but you can grab the files from this branch oin Github in the meantime.
New K2 video class by OSTraining
Written by Fotis Evangelou
The great folks at OSTraining.com - the premier training company on everything Joomla! related - have created a new series of video tutorials for K2. As part of their new "Joomla! K2" training class, OSTraining.com instructor Vicki Watson will walk you through K2 in three parts. In the first part of the class you'll learn how to set up and configure K2. In the second part of the class you'll learn how to create an oustanding blog with K2. You'll be taught these skills:
Importing your Joomla! content and categories into K2.
Controlling your K2 menus links and formatting.
Managing users and authors in K2.
