Joomla! 1.5 movement – YOOtheme's in!
Reading the recent blog post of Johan Janssens at joomlatools.org, we were impressed by the momentum which Joomla! 1.5 gained over the last months since its stable release back in January. And now the Joomla! download statistics show that the overall Joomla! 1.5 downloads superseded the previous Joomla! 1.0 version. Further the developers of all the popular Joomla! extensions move their efforts towards the next native Joomla! 1.5 version of their extensions. It seems everyone has realized that developing for Joomla! 1.5 makes even more fun! Using the latest features and enhanced framework of Joomla! 1.5 makes it even easier and cleaner to integrate well to the Joomla! core. So what is the result of the hard-working developers? The answer is pretty simple: some great native Joomla! 1.5 extensions have just arrived like Community Builder, Rokbridge and JCE. Well, and this is only the start, so we expect more extensions to come over the next months.
So now you would ask, what will YOOtheme offer to the Joomla! 1.5 movement? Well, like everybody we are really excited to play around with all the new stuff in Joomla! 1.5! Which means from now on we will focus on building Joomla! 1.5 templates, by using the latest 1.5 enhancements and creating templates the take advantage of all the new Joomla! 1.5 capabilities. For example, we use the 'template-override' technique which is a really simple but powerful feature. It allows the template to override the rendered HTML which is created by the Joomla! core. We already used this feature to accomplish the complex YOOmenu styles in all our previous Joomla! 1.5 templates. Now we use the same technique to enhance the modules HTML rendering which enables us to create better module styles by using even cleaner CSS code. These are some new features we introduced with the latest YOOtheme template:
- New advanced module rendering
- Optimized module CSS using faster CSS selectors and reduced overall size more than 50%
- New YOOmenu subtitles in your main navigation
- New IE6 .PNG fix for template images only using CSS
- Global gzip compression for CSS and JS files set in the template configuration
- Enabling gzip reduces the CSS/JS sizes significantly
- Note: the Chrome template only has 9kb CSS, 25kb JS with mootools
