Joomulus with Japanese Character Support – Kana
Joomulus is updated! The flash Tag cloud for Joomla now includes improved styling! More languages! Full details and download link below the Japanese character demo.
If you LOVE Joomulus please show your appreciation by using the social bookmarking links at the bottom of this post. Or you can go ahead and DIGG right now! Or add it to your delicious bookmarks!
Updates include:
The mouse pointer displays as a hand when hovering over tags – as you would expect for a hyperlink.
X and Y scaling is fixed – you can get an elongated spread of tags by adjusting this value as seen in our Joomulus Demo.
Language/character sets included in this module are as follows:
- English/Basic Latin
- Greek/English
- Japanese – Kana
- Bulgarian/Russian/Serbian/English – Cyrillic Base
- Portuguese/Polish/English – Latin Extended Base
We plan to release Turkish, Chinese and a number of others very soon – time did not allow for this release – leave your comments and suggestions below.
Transparent Joomla Template – TransBear Updated!
TransBear – Our very popular Transparent Joomla Template has been updated. Check out the demo site at http://transbear.joomlabear.com
The template now features built in Son of SuckerFish dropdown menus, and we have integrated Drew McLellan’s Transparency Fix for IE6 and below.
We have also added a SlideShowPro Installation to the demo site. NOTE This is not included with the template as it is a commercial product and needs to be purchased seperately – However we are offering a new Joomla and SlideshowPro setup service, where we set up your Joomla website with SlideshowPro and the Director Image manager.
To download or upgrade TransBear please visit the TransBear – Transparent Joomla Template page.
Some things you should note are as follows – The transparency fix requires an image named x.gif be placed in your site root directory. We have included this in the template installer – but it is not possible to install this into the Joomla root via the template installer- the file named x.gif will be in your site template root directory after installation and you should move this to the site root so that the transparency fix works correctly for IE6 and below.
Additionally for the drop-down menus to function you need to apply a module class suffix of _sf to your menu module and publish in top-nav position. As shown in the screenshot below:
Free Joomla Christmas Template – Falling Snow
Below is a screen shot of our Christmas gift to you, a free Joomla Christmas Template that includes animated falling snow created with Flash. The template has been tested in IE6 and above – and there is a transparency fix built in for the older browsers. It works perfectly in all modern browsers such as Firefox, Chrome and Safari.
Check out the demo site which features Artificial Christmas Trees displayed with the K2 content construction kit.
Leave us a comment if you like it – and leave a comment with a link if you use it for your Christmas web promotions.
For more information, and to download, visit the Joomla Christmas template page on the main site.
Joomla SEF – An Amazing Support Story
I’ve just written the statement below as a review on extensions.joomla.org, but thought I would also post this here because I’m so impressed with the support I just received, the quality of the extension, and I want the JoomlaBear community to know about it.
I also want to give you all a heads-up about what I consider to be the new heavy-weight Joomla SEF extension that you should consider using over the other big names in SEF URL’s.
I’m switching to AceSEF because it’ faster and the support is amazing – It’s the type of support we give out at JoomlaBear, a willingness to get in and sort things out for our users. And this type of support is rare.
Below is my review of AceSEF:
I just had the best support experience I have ever had with anything related to Joomla. I contacted JoomACE via live chat to ask a couple of pre-sales questions – mainly to find out if AceSEF would be able to handle everything I needed for a Joomla/K2 installation.
A polite and courteous individual helped me through all my questions via Live Chat – and very promptly too.
So I went ahead and setup AceSEF and found that a feature I had wanted for SEF and K2 was not working the way I wanted – Please note, not a fault with AceSEF but a special requirement for my site – a URL format that would not be typical for most users (I’m pedantic about these things 
So I got back on the live chat with JoomACE and within minutes their developers were logging into my Joomla installation and adding a new feature to the extension! AMAZING SERVICE!
I can’t recommend this extension highly enough – I’ve used sh404SEF on over 100 Joomla sites that I have built in the past 3 years – But I’m switching to AceSEF – It appears to run faster, and the support… need I say anymore?
Final note – I’ve spent days testing various SEF extensions and hacking the sh404SEF extension for K2 – nothing worked properly – AceSEF solved all my K2 SEF issues out of the box and is the BEST option if you are using K2 and Joomla – in my opinion.
Give it a whirl.
Note: I paid $19 for the professional version of AceSEF that allows me to remove the attribution link – but you can get the same full featured SEF extension for FREE if you don’t mind your pages showing a link back to the AceSEF site. If in doubt try the free version, you won’t be disappointed. sh404SEF is now a paid extension too and the only free option is the Joomla core SEF. Joomla’s built in SEF is fine if you are not doing anything fancy with your Joomla site but if you want to run a component like a shopping cart or forum then you will want Search Engine Friendly URL’s for these as well.
AceSEF Control Panel Screenshot
Halloween Joomla Template – The Making Of
View the Halloween Template Demo
Our Free Halloween Joomla Template is live and the official template page can be found at the previous link. There you will find links to download, source files, documentation of module positions, etc.
The demo site was designed around the idea of a simple Halloween costumes store. I didn’t really get time to flesh out the store with sample products so I hope you will just appreciate the overall aesthetic of the design 
and then put it to good use in your own projects.
Below is an image of my finished artwork in Adobe Fireworks – everything is on layers so elements can be switched out, edited, etc.
An example of how useful this can be is a quick hue/saturation filter I applied to the background layer, which gives us a really nice alternative effect:
The source files for this project are available to premium Joomlabear members in our downloads area.
I wanted to talk briefly about how I created the artwork and give credit where credit is due.
I’m very proud of the moon – this was created by cutting out an actual photo of a moon and then sitting it over the top of an orange gradient – I then changed the blend mode to Freeze to give a very orange Halloween look.
The font which I used for the logo, and which looks like dripping blood, or something right out of the Rocky Horror Picture Show is called Creepsville. It’s free for any use so you can grab this and make your own logos, etc.
The background was created using Photoshop, I took an image that had a large amount of the night blue color in the template, and ran a Gaussian blur over it. I then used a number of excellent free photoshop cloud brushes from Qbrushes, and set them to black – overlaying these over my blue background.
The various Halloween icons, such as the Jack-O-Lantern, spider, cat, crow, bats and witch (you did spot the witch didn’t you?) were taken from an excellent Halloween Photoshop brush set from Obsidian Dawn. Love your work guys.
Hope you all enjoy the template! Leave a comment and let me know if you found this useful, and what projects you are using the template on.
