Joomla and AWBS Bridge

Posted on April 3, 2008
Filed Under Products | 5 Comments

Joomla – AWBS Template and User Bridge

One of the coolest products I’ve used in the past few years for my servers is the AWBS shopping cart for hosting companies. This tool is exceptionally detailed and efficient in billing for recurring monthly hosting and the ease in which it can be added to a PLESK or cPanel server makes it my number one suggested solution to clients seeking such a package.
 
Templates in AWBS however are not just a tragic and difficult undertaking for designers they are exceptionally complex and most examples, even commercial ones, are jam packed with countless broken elements and nested tables making them impossible to build truly XHTML / CSS compliant designs.  I truly love AWBS but the templates needed help and I avoided it for a very long time because I knew the scale of the project and time it would take would need to be justified somehow.  Well I found justification.
 

AWBS Template Designers Resource Kit

This particular design resource kit is essentially a foundation master template for AWBS using all conforming XHTML and CSS required markup and also includes a few extra open source extras to assist in things like forcing of column length, and ajax loading of some elements using an open source library called DHTMLX. 
 
After spending nearly 4 days cleaning up the code from the default business theme included with AWBS I then used the code elements as a sort of template foundation.  Having removed or changed 16,000+ design and layout related elements from the template I was able to get the base template 90% XHTML / CSS compliant as well as reduce the overall template weight to 1/3 the original size.  
 
What I then decided to include was a handful of small snippets that would allow users of Joomla 1.0.12 – 1.0.15 the ability to bridge registrations and to provide a way to control menus in AWBS from within the Joomla admin panel.  Naturally this took an Adobe Captivate Video to explain it in better detail how to do this. 
 
That leaves us with a final project or product that includes the following;
 
  1. AWBS master layout template kit (of sorts) that is XHTML and CSS compliant for the most part.
  2. Dreamweaver snippets I use for the drop in template tags
  3. The JS Library
  4. The Joomla External Modules code and video on how to use
  5. The WordPress inclusion functions called wpglobal.php This allows you to put snippets from your blog in AWBS.
  6. swfobject.js version 2.0 for the flash jpg slide show I have included
  7. 3 videos outlining the use of the master layout for building templates.

Released as AWBS Template Kit – version 1.0 – the price is $39.95 and is available now.

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