Here are some interesting Joomla blog posts I found during week 32, 2013:
- Image Optimization Solutions
- What's Going on With Documentation?
- 30+ Responsive Joomla Templates
- Portal Responsive Joomla template
- How to assign a template to a specific page in Joomla 3?
Written by Ryan Pierson
One of the best ways to improve the performance of a sluggish websites comes in the form of image optimization. As sites become increasingly visual, it’s easy to get carried away and add significant amounts of data to each page load. This can quickly bog down your server, increase load times for visitors, and do a number on your bandwidth bill. One simple and easy solution to this problem is to run your site’s images through an image optimizer. By reducing the file size without significantly impacting an image’s visual appeal, you can achieve faster page load times and lower per-visitor bandwidth usage which will make you and your visitors very happy.
The problem with many of the current image optimization solutions out there is that they degrade the quality of your images significantly. This is a problem across the board. If you reduce the amount of data in each image file, corners get cut and quality is sacrificed. It’s because of this that it’s important to try multiple solutions in order to find the workflow that works best for you and your site.
What's Going on With Documentation?
Written by Ryan Pierson
Documentation is a key component to virtually any Web technology. At this point, we’ve largely relied on our forums to provide answers, as well as a place to ask questions that arise from our community upon using our products. In addition, we’ve provided detailed information about our demo sites in order to make it easier to recreate various elements on your own site. We’ve also released copies of our demo site in the form of RocketLaunchers in order to provide a real-world reference that makes it easier to hit the ground running with a feature-rich and aesthetically pleasing starting point for our templates.
With this in mind, we realize that there is a lot more we can do. That is why we’ve been working tirelessly over the past several months to create an entirely new set of documentation for nearly our entire product catalog. This includes everything from our Gantry Framework, to templates, and even our extensions.
We’ve already released our Gantry Framework documentation and made it available to anyone with the desire to create their own template with Gantry. Our next phase of documentation focuses on our club and free products available through RocketTheme.com.
30+ Responsive Joomla Templates
Written by Anthony Olsen
I meant to blog about this a few months ago but the release of the Portal Joomla template yesterday prompted me to (re) count the number of responsive templates we have in our catalogue. Portal pushed our responsive Joomla template count above the 30 template mark and as of now we have a total of 33 responsive templates available to download. So this post is really just a little trip down memory lane to see the breadth and variety of designs that we have created since the Focus template we release way back in September 2011.
Where to from here?
So after looking through this post it begs the question - what kind of designs do you want to see? Which third party extensions would you like us to support? Help us to guide the design of the next 30 Joomla templates.
Portal Responsive Joomla template
Written by Anthony Olsen
In the spirit of Newstream and Newscycle, Portal is a minimal and stylish news portal / magazine theme for Joomla. It features a responsive design with a tonne of module positions and module classes that allow you to take your Joomla content to a new level.
Portal also includes full compatibility with Zenkit our stand alone responsive templates for K2. We added a new layout to Zenkit called Featured which you can also see in action on the Portal K2 demo. The new layout simply changes the order of the K2 image and K2 video and places it before the title appears. This simple adjustment means it's even easier to create a good looking blog layout that features your K2 images and video.
Portal also features styling for the Joomla 3.1+ tag component. Tags are baked into the main Joomla content component and are a very handy way to catalogue your content across multiple categories. Check out our How to use tags in Joomla 3.1 blog post if you missed it.
How to assign a template to a specific page in Joomla 3?
Written by Anthony Olsen
During the development of a website, developers often encounter situations where they need to define a different template or template layout for a specific page on the site. Joomla provides two methods for achieving this - via the template directly or via the menu item itself. This document will take you through the process of defining a new template copy and its assignment to a specific menu item.
Create a duplicate copy of your template
In this example we are going to assign a variation of our default template to a specific menu item. In order to do this we need to use the duplicate template function in the template administrator. Please note that it is not possible to assign the default template to a menu item since it is already assigned to all menu item
