News
CMS Expo May 2-4, 2011
I'll be presenting "What's new with templates in Joomla! 1.6" at CMS Expo. Two back-to-back workshops on Tuesday afternoon will cover new features of Joomla! 1.6 that are pretty cool and powerful.
What's New in Templates for 1.6?
Parameters: not just for template shops anymore!
With the abiltiy to easily assign variants of your custom template (template styles) for particular sections or individual pages of your site, building in these options with parameters can be a powerful tool. This workshop will look at the template manager, the template parameters of the beez5 and beez 2 templates and then demonstrate the process of adding parameters to a custom template.
What's New in Templates for 1.6?
Template overrides, Layout overrides and Custom Menu Item Types.
The html folder of a template is both less necessary and more powerful in Joomla 1.6. Less necessary because the improvements of the core Joomla! output means you don't have do extensive overrides just to get goood clean html code, and more powerful because you now can create layout overrides that you apply to only parts of your website. We'll look at examples of layout overrides in the sample data, and then take them a step further while demonstrating the process of making a template override (global), a layout override assigned for certain contacts, articles, or categories, and a custom menu item type that will apply the overrides at the menu item level.
I'll have a new companion Template card (featuring a yellow iris) with all of the new 1.6 stuff. My purple Cheat Sheet 2 for 1.5 still has useful tips ans strategies, only a few things are obsolete with 1.6.
Joomla Day New England
I'll be presenting a Joomla! Templates workshop on April 2, 2011 at Joomla Day New England.
The focus will be on What's New in Joomla! 1.6:
The process of converting a static html page with css into a template file hasn’t changed too much, but Joomla 1.6 offers even more ways to customize your template. In this one hour workshop I’ll give an overview of the new options available for styling with Joomla! 1.6 and how the template manager has changed. If time allows, I'll walk you through a simple template conversion from a static html file.
Froggy Bottom Guitar site launches!
I've been maintaining the Froggy Bottom Guitar site for several years and talking with the owner about a new site. This is the 40th anniversary of Michael Millard building Froggy Bottom Guitars, so it seemed appropriate to celebrate with a new website and we got to work in a serious way in January. The Fretboard Journal saw the 40th anniversary coming as well, and last November my husband sent off the final edit of a feature article about our friend Michael and his wonderful guitars. It turns out that magazine publishing and web site development run on similar schedules -- not quite a year later, the feature article is out in the edition that hit the newsstands around October 1st. We launched the new site on October 2nd.
May Day Rally in Montpelier
I've been involved with The Vermont Workers Center's Healthcare is a Human Right campaign for about a year now. Our efforts have paid off! The Vermont House of Representatives just passed a bill that came through the Vermont Senate -- it calls for planning for Universal (Single Payer) Health Care for all Vermonters -- a plan is to be ready for next year's legislative session. We're having a big rally - now celebration on May first, and I'll be there! The NEXT day I'll head to Chicago for CMS Expo....
CMS Expo May 2-5, 2010
I'll be presenting Joomla! Templates workshops on Tuesday and Wednesday at this great conference that brings great minds together from Joomla! to Drupal, to Word Press to Plone and on and on.
