Drupal Templates -Template Design Kit

Posted on April 24, 2007
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Drupal Template Design Kit

I’ve avoided the idea of adding Drupal to the mix of available template design kit variants and after doing dozens of sites I realize that the popularity of Drupal is such that its certainly worthy of adding it to the inventory.

I contracted a third party to lay the foundation based on our inventory of CSS masters and with any luck it will be released shortly after the others.

FREE OpenRealty Templates (Forked)

Posted on April 20, 2007
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A Handful of Beautiful OpenRealty Templates

I took OpenRealty and forked it along with all of our old designs converted to work in both the existing build of OpenRealty and this forked variant. I’ve been building OpenRealty sites since it was a product released by Jon Roig many years ago and I still do IDX / RETS integrated sites with OpenRealty. Its a good entry level product for most offices and agents. But cleaning out my archives I found dozens of designs I abandoned over the years and will make available if anyone is interested. YES, YES, YES I know the Open Realty Template Design Kit Read more

Variable Columns Using osCommerce BTS Templates

Posted on April 20, 2007
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Beautiful osCommerce Templates are readily available if beauty is in fact in the eyes of the beholder. Part of beautiful template design has a great deal to do with features of the design as well. I’m a firm believer that the look of a site means more in terms of how its perceived than any other facet with the exception being that of frequently updated quality content.

When you want two columns here and three there, what next.
One thing that has kept truly interesting and beautiful template designs from being drop in turn key solutions with oscommerce is largely due to the hard coding requirements for templates. BTS and STS are two attempts to provide a pseudo template structure that makes ease of templating sCommerce and its offshoot flavors like osCMax or CRE Loaded easier to template.
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Joomla Template Design Kit

Posted on April 20, 2007
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Joomla Template Design Kit RELEASE June 1st

I think we are going to separate these. The template kit has grown to just shy of 4GB and I think that a lot of people would end up purchasing the kit solely on the basis of its Joomla related facets. Because of this I think a stripped down Joomla only version of the Template Design Kit will be released as well.

We will just label it as the Joomla Template Design Kit and then offer updates free of charge for version 1.5 of Joomla including template updates. Beautiful Joomla templates are more common now today than the early days of Joomla. So many powerful and beautiful web templates have become available over the past year that a section in the Template Design Kit will feature a segment dealing with color schemes and a full run down of the “Rapid Template Design” method used by large template houses such as Template Monster and Broderbund.

I’ll post screen shots of the Joomla Template Design Kit this weekend.

Thanks for all the emails I’ve gotten in the past month.

Template Design Kit Update!

Posted on April 12, 2007
Filed Under Template Design Kit | 2 Comments

Delays nearly over, I’ve had to change perspective on a few areas to accommodate priorities in the features of the kit. I’ve expanded a few fundamental features and went back to basics on the design procedure. However, I’m still unable to get the kit onto a single DVD comfortably I’ll be removing some non essential elements and posting them for download on the new site.

Some of the elements will include things that are specific to various applications like osCommerce or vBulletin for example. Since these applications tend to change with frequency it may actually be better to put all application specific design elements where we can modify them to follow version changes.

Joomla Template Design Kit
I really hope that I can get this published and ready for use by months end. The Joomla Template Design Kit Elements as well as the Mambo Template Design Kit Elements will also be featured in the registered member area for download. Many additions have already been laid out for this section of the template design kit largely because of the popularity of Joomla and Mambo. Its been a real serious challenge finding the best overall method for teaching students ways to understand some of the more complex template structures as well as integrated structures like the one that osCommerce uses.

Again, without letting to much out of the bag at this point, when it comes to osCommerce related template design elements Mark opted to teach about only one template engine called BTS “Basic Template Structure” and not the STS system.

Feel free to contact me in advance for individual parts, branding, and reselling of the Template Design Kit for Mambo, Joomla, osCommerce, OpenRealty, vBulletin, and osCMax.
UPDATE! April 13th, 2007: I’m including osCommerce Template components and osCommerce Dreamweaver template components as well.

Joomla CMS Raises The Bar

Posted on April 12, 2007
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Joomla positioned to grow as fast as Apache did!

Joomla CMS has broken all barriers and rewrote the rule book when it comes to open-source project successes. For the first year of its existence, Joomla was largely a European and Australian craze that soon caught on as it was recognized as a serious development tool for content driven sites.

Now Joomla is being recognized with greater frequency by developers and site builders as a serious tool in the web developers arsenal just as valued as any commercial development application. Comparing Joomla to the internet’s #1 free application “Apache” may be bold, but Joomla has crashed on the scene with has much vigor and tenacity that seasoned professionals are starting to take notice as the attitude is shifting on a global level regarding free open-source applications. Nearly reminiscent of the days Apache was considered hippie and non conformist because it wasn’t Microsoft. Despite billion dollar marketing efforts for IIS, web servers using Apache exploded overnight.

Today Joomla announced that it has the largest Open Source CMS focused forum on the planet. Having reached 100,000+ users whom have signed up (validated), Joomla! contends with some of the biggest forums on the Internet rivaling even the most authoritative and laced up professional communities in terms of participation. Reaching this 100k watershed is significant as the heart of this reveals true Open Source source spirit with many of these members sharing their knowledge and experience. And this strength — the backbone of the project in many ways — manifests in a mature ‘eco-system’ that’s self-supporting. Thousands of helping hands and minds. With such explosive growth, Joomla could be as popular as Linux or even Apache in the scheme of internet solutions.
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osCommerce Waste of Time?

Posted on April 11, 2007
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Have you ever worked for a long time trying to improve something only to discover its already been done?

osCommerce, a popular open-source eCommerce solution has been my fundamental commerce site design tool second only to xCart, but over time I took notice that I had been performing the same tasks over and over again and decided to put that madness to rest.

Ambition and determination as the driving force for my objective I had spent a solid week modding and altering osCommerce to include dozens of very popular and in my opinion very necessary modifications. Hell bent on making osCommerce easier to template by cleaning up the exhaustively messy code and applying tag points for DreamWeaver, my modification came off without a hitch and serves as my new design foundation for future osCommerce projects. Although Great! I discovered to my frustration a similar endeavor has already been done by Michael over at http://www.oscmax.com.
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PHPMailer Class Bug Fix!

Posted on April 2, 2007
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PHPMailer e-mail class is likely one of the most popular e-mail classes in use on the web today. Written by Brent R. Matzelle, many open source projects use the phpmailer class because of its clean structure and ease of use.

Recently an associate of mine discovered that errors can be produced when the class is used in applications which feature a CC or BCC for emailing and subsequently modified the code to accommodate a solution. Now since this class is used in things like Joomla and other products I tend to favor, I figured I’d publish a copy here for your use. You can find the original PHPMailer on the source forge site.
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Love that vBulletin?

Posted on April 2, 2007
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Countless hours and just as many headaches with all the flavors of forum software led me to a shift in design policy to limit my future designs being sold on the new template site to vBulletin and Simple Machines Forums. Is that an announcement? Well, sort of, but more of a declaration of what I believe to be the only true conclusion for the best forum solutions among those available. I’m biased yes, since I own or administer literally dozens of vBulletin forums for clients and friends on this giant internet.

I’ve said it for years and I’m quoted in countless forums where the arguments have come up on which forum solution is the best and I’ve always believed vBulletin is it. But more and more I’m getting people asking about design work for SMF (Simple Machines Forums) largely because of the massive popularity of Joomla CMS.
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How to Expire Template Demos

Posted on April 2, 2007
Filed Under Design, Template Design Kit | 2 Comments


Expiring template demonstrations and protecting your work.

If you’ve ever wanted to allow a potential customer the ability to demo your template or themes while still protecting your rights then this little snippet may be the answer.

The idea behind the code is to simply provide a potential buyer or client a theme they can test run on their domain and expire the template after a period of time. Having worked for large template houses in the past, I’ve seen all too frequently where people have ripped off designs by simply looking at the web page source code and figuring out the rest from there. The temptation is to use tactics many times lengthy to protect your work often resulting in a slow loading site.

Now I use to publish live demos on my domains much like the template houses do and one of my favorite techniques that works great is to simply encrypt the template with a tool called HTML Guardian which works beautifully for such things. You can post a live working example of the theme or template and the code is completely hidden from prying eyes until they purchase the design.

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