JoomlaPraise is back! New updates, new staff—same commitment to quality Joomla! products

Dear friends,

As you may recall, JoomlaPraise’s founder, Gary Gisclair, posted a blog a few months back detailing his progress updating JP’s templates to Joomla! 1.7/2.5 and his desire to get JoomlaPraise re-launched and once-again releasing “great templates & extensions” in 2012.

Gary had been working around the clock to make this happen, but after the birth of his twin daughters this past fall, it quickly became apparent to him that it would be difficult to continue working full-time at JoomlaPraise now that he was a new Dad.

Gary didn’t want to let his customers down, so he asked ‘corePHP’, a respected Joomla! development & design company, if they could assist. After a few months of working with Gary on updating JP’s templates, ‘corePHP’ offered to acquire JoomlaPraise.

We’re happy to report that Gary accepted the offer and, today, JoomlaPraise is now officially a part of the ‘corePHP’ Joomla! Products & Services family.

MobilePraise, the JoomlaPraise iPhone template for Joomla, is growing up and moving out into its own digs.

Just as AdminPraise & Projectfork did in the past, MobilePraise has outgrown its JoomlaPraise birthplace. MobilePraise will get its own site, a new name, and a new big brother on the iPad!

Enter: TapTheme Mobile Joomla Templates

We've all heard the phrase a hundred thousand times, 'KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid'. Looking at our templates and extensions, you might think this is the phrase that we live and breathe on a daily basis. We always talk about how our templates are Simple, Clean, Easy to use and Flexible. But why do all of those things matter to us so much?

More importantly; Why should they matter to you?

Warning: This article begins with a short rant.

Last week I started off with an topic for this article that I really thought was going to be awesome; to find 10 of the best Free Joomla Templates out there and tell you why I think they're awesome. I searched high and low, from BestOfJoomla.com to the Joomla Resources Directory, and you know what? I could hardly even find five to make the list (see after the break for the list).

Obviously, I'm not counting the 8 free Joomla templates that we've built for you over the last few years (we have more free templates for Joomla 1.5 than any other club, dontcha know), but even with cutting our own massive collection out you'd think there would be plenty of other great free templates to choose from, right?

Mercado is our first major entry into Joomla Ecommerce Templates. This template comes w/unique styles for 3 big components: VirtueMart, Tienda and K2. It's packed with 5 beautiful themes, 34 flexible module positions, 10 ribbon module styles, 10 button styles, and 5 slick ribbon banner styles. A CSS dropdown menu is built-in and our new TiendaSlides module (jQuery Tienda product slider) is included as well, whew! We'll go into more detail with screenshots after the break.

[Product Info] [Demo] [Download Now!] 

With the 4th beta of Joomla 1.6 just released, many folks are probably wanting to know what it will take to get their Joomla 1.5 template working in Joomla 1.6. As a test, we've migrated our Genesis (free) template to 1.6 and made a few notes.

Rounding out our JomSocial 1.8 template updates is Fanboy, our most recent JomSocial Joomla template. Checkout the updated live Fanboy demo to see it in action.

This is our third and final Joomla template update for JomSocial 1.8. We've also updated CommunityPraise and SocialPraise.

While I've been knocking these JomSocial updates out, Gary's been hard at working on our upcoming Tienda / VirtueMart Template. More on that soon!

Continuing with our updates for JomSocial 1.8 (SocialPraise was last), our CommunityPraise Joomla template has been updated to support the latest from Azrul. The live CommunityPraise demo has also been updated.

Included in the latest version is support for the Default JomSocial layout. Previous versions only supported the Blueface JomSocial layout, which is only included in Professional Editor of JomSocial. View screenshots after the break.

JomSocial 1.8 "Wazi" is out, and it's fantastic. We're now in the process of updating our JomSocial Templates for compatibility with the latest and greatest. First up is SocialPraise (which is also compatible with Community Builder). The live SocialPraise Demo is running all the latest versions.

This is our second article on building a mobile friendly Joomla website using two of our releases, the Template By Browser Plugin and MobilePraise Template. You can read Part 1, an introduction to why and how you can building mobile friendly Joomla websites for iPhone, Android, Palm and other mobile browsers here.

In this article I go over some tips on how to customize the MobilePraise Joomla template to be even more mobile friendly than the default configuration allows.

Making The Template Yours

When you finally have your copy of the MobilePraise template installed on your website (and the Template By Browser plugin is enabled and configured to display the template on mobile devices), you'll want to do a few things to completely own the structure of the template and make it unique to your website's purpose.