JoomlArt's Blog

Our Magento themes have gone through lot of changes in terms of design, responsive layouts, features and complimentary extensions. 4-years seems long but time flies when the desire to improve is strong. If you look at our first Magento theme and our latest one, you can appreciate how the user demand and availability of new technologies have impacted our deliveries. Skim through our Magento themes showcase, clearly there is a design evolution here. Back in the days our Magento themes were basic and simple with typical 3-column-layout, and now our themes are sophisticated and lively than ever.

In this blog, we are going to look back at each year and review remarkable designs represented by our picked themes.

Yes! we did it right this time. Our Joomla templates (running T3v3 framework) now supports Right to left (RTL) language layouts. If you all remember we were the first to introduce native RTL support in Joomla templates via our T3v2 framework but it was a cumbersome process and hard work to release and maintain them, we eventually had to pause the RTL support, it was a hard decision then. For quite many months we have been working hard for the development and improvement of our T3 framework for Joomla! 2.5 / 3.0. Addition of Right to left layouts was one of the important feature and I am happy to announce that the feature is now available. RTL support in the latest T3 framework now uses the bootstrap RTL and is amazingly simple to use.

Neat and strong, elegant and fashionable, these words may cross your mind when you first see our latest Magento responsive theme JM Sporty. The spotlight of this theme is our new extension – JM Color Swatch that gives the viewers a clearer visualization of the product in other available size and color. In this theme, we also support the Off-canvas navigation which gives better display layout for your store on mobile devices and tablet.

Besides, there is a list of not to miss out Magento extensions which we support in this sporty theme: JM Slideshow, JM Basetheme, JM Mega Menu, Product slider and so on.

Happy 4th of July!

It’s 4th of July - time to celebrate with barbecue and firework.

What a better way to celebrate 4th of July with us by having your desired memberships with more value for less money!

JM Flannel - one of our best responsive Magento themes, released early this year has won many hearts. We reached out to JM Flannel members asking for permission to highlight their sites for the showcase and here are some of the Magento stores using JM Flannel. It is interesting to note that though JM Flannel demo is themed around camera store but members have easily adapted it for their products ranging from sportswear to electronics / laptop stores.

Congratulations on choosing to use Joomla for your website Content Management System (CMS). Currently Joomla 2.5 is the current Long Term Support (LTS) version, and Joomla 3.1 is the current Short Term Support (STS) version. After Joomla 3.1, there will be Joomla 3.2, then follow the next Long Term Support version Joomla 3.5 due for release in March 2014.

Same money, more themes.

Yes, get more out of your Magento theme Single Personal purchase with our limited-time-offer: Buy One get One FREE

JM Lingerie - responsive Magento theme for Magento lingerie store is the latest addition to our ever growing portfolio of responsive Magento themes. If you look closely, its not just a theme, it is feature packed and one should be able to get it up and running in no time. One of the important thing that we have been focusing is that the Magento store theme should be responsive, that means the Magento extensions used in the theme should support responsive layouts too. Well, JM Lingerie fits the bill perfectly. Another great feature is its JM Basetheme color customizer, which allows users to customize the theme colors easily, without having to hack the code. We have also upgraded Magento Category List extension for this theme. For more details on all our new Magento responsive extensions, check out our earlier blog post new Magento extensions.

For the past few months, we have gone extra miles in developing and improving our Magento modules and extensions. The goal is to bring better user experience in our Magento themes and make it easier for the customer to browse the site in a better way. These new extensions compliment our responsive Magento themes.

JM Siotis is our first Responsive Magento theme which supports off-canvas navigation used in mobile and tablet devices. The theme also comes with the latest QuickBuy module, which supports transitions and effects developed specially for this theme only. Not to mention the Mega menu with featured products, JM Basetheme for easy customization and an auto-updated shopping cart feature this theme is loaded with.

Everyone is different when it comes down to color choices. Some love red, and some just happen to hate it. For the last few years, we have designed theme and picked out all the “popular” colors in the family such as yellow, red, orange, blue, green, purple and pink for our beloved Magento geeks, hoping to cover the color preferences of everyone out there. But, does it cover all? No, even each color has its own shades.

What is an animation effect?

T3 Framework has recently come out with its latest feature for Megamenu: the animation effect in displaying sub-menu for Joomla! template. This happens in the seconds your sub-menu is dropping down as your mouse is hovering over a certain category in your megamenu.

JA Hawkstore is our first Joomla 2.5 responsive e-commerce template for the year 2013, featuring Virtuemart component. Not just the default Virtuemart, but better with free add-in product slider module and a bonus feature for the shopping cart.

JA Hawkstore runs on our latest T3 Framework, which provide you with the options to control layouts in desktop or responsive layouts.

Following up with our Batch 1 upgrade for Joomla 3.1, here is our batch 2 upgrade for our most 13 popular extensions. Please always take due back-up of your site before proceeding to any of the upgrade process.

Following up with our upgrade plan mentioned in our Joomla 3.1 stable release is now available and JoomlArt's upgrade plan announcement yesterday. We’re here with our first batch for Joomla 3.1 upgrade:

Here at JoomlArt we are so excited that Joomla 3.1 stable version has been released this morning. We have been following the release dates closely ever since Joomla 3.1 first announcement was out and played with all of the Beta versions including the recent Beta 5. This is an important release due to the many new features including the much anticipated Tags feature. Apart from it, the Joomla 3.1 release also includes few more exciting new features :

Overview

We were probably the first of the Joomla template clubs to introduce Mega Menu feature with our first generation T3 framework way back in 2009. It was an instant hit and we have refined the mega menu workflow since then and in our latest T3 framework V3, we moved to jquery instead of mootools. In the template userguides, we provide screenshots of how we configure the Mega Menu as in the demo site. But what if you are trying to configure Mega Menu without any userguides? That is when this tutorial comes in to play its role.

It does so happen that we choose templates and extensions for our Joomla project and start building the site, adding more extensions as we go and since most of the development happens on the localhost, site loading / performance does not seem to be an issue. Shock sets in, when the site is moved to live server and tested and having invested 100’s of hours, its way difficult to remove extensions or cut down features to improve site performance. This is the story of most of the people asking for professional help to optimize their sites.

Remember, if it’s heavy... it’s going to load slower.

What should one do?

From day one, keep the site optimization as one of the top priorities. Have tools to measure the effect of each and every addition you make on the site’s overall performance before adding them and try to fix an upper limit for site size and HTTP requests. Here are some of the easy-to-use tools to test your website.

The Chaos

We have been developing extensions from the days of Mambo / Joomla 1.0, throughout these years, we do confront numerous issues arising from the way we code and structure them. The race is to have a working extension for the active joomla versions, but these upgrades for Joomla version fixes has also led to many issues :

1. Most of the extensions have been upgraded from Joomla 1.5 version till today. With all the upgrades they have been through, the extension structure is bit of a mess.
2. The extensions have been developed independently without any standardization; such as the UI, the common library sharing, leading to the inconsistent of:
• Setting forms: No standardization and unprofessional look
• No common library sharing: which request your website to keep loading pretty much the same library over and over again. This contributes "big time" in slowing down website performance. For instance, the jQuery library has been loaded multiple times with different versions for different type of extensions running on the same template.

How Can We Fix That?

We simply standardize and restructure them which do requires lot of work, but all worth it in the end.

The Joomla 3.1 release date is quickly approaching and we are excited to see so many new developments. One feature we are especially excited for is the introduction of tags into the core of Joomla, enabling users to implement tagging across all content. When the update is released we are looking forward to many interesting developments with the tagging. According to Joomla we can look forward to innovative features such as: